SILVER SCREEN

FRANKENSTEIN (AGAIN): ON CREATION WITHOUT RESPONSIBILITY

CHRIS HOLLANDER

February 3, 2026

Taking Guillermo del Toro’s latest film “Frankenstein” (2025) as its point of departure, this essay traces how Mary Shelley’s novel continues to structure our thinking, from the atomic bomb to artificial intelligence, and our refusal to remain answerable for what we create.

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Each generation believes that it has finally found the right moment for Frankenstein. The story returns whenever technological confidence begins to outrun moral clarity, whenever creation accelerates faster than responsibility. This is why Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818), written by Mary Shelley (1797–1851), has never belonged securely to the nineteenth century. It is a book written too early and reread too late, again and again, each time under a different form of pressure. The latest cinematic return of Frankenstein, arriving amid renewed anxieties about artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and creations that no longer require continuous human supervision, feels less like an adaptation than a symptom.

What is striking is not that Frankenstein has been remade again and again, but that it is once again being treated as contemporary. Shelley did not imagine the future as spectacle. She imagined it as aftermath.

Shelley was eighteen when she began writing Frankenstein. The subtitle—or The Modern Prometheus—is important. Prometheus, as inherited from Greek myth and reframed through Enlightenment thought, is punished not for creating fire but for refusing the limits imposed by the gods. Shelley’s novel is not a warning against invention per se. It is a warning against invention severed from obligation. Victor Frankenstein does not fail because he animates a body. He fails because he abandons what he has made the moment it becomes inconvenient, unattractive, or unpredictable. His crime is not creation, but desertion.

This logic reappears with chilling clarity in the twentieth century, when Frankenstein briefly ceased to function primarily as metaphor and became historical condition. The atomic bomb, first detonated in 1945 at Trinity, and then over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was not feared because it might misbehave. It was feared because it worked exactly as intended. Its uncontrollability lay not in malfunction but in consequence. Like Victor Frankenstein, its creators could explain the science indefinitely while remaining unable, or unwilling, to remain morally present to what they had released into the world.

Consciousness arrives; instructions do not.

The bomb introduced a new category of creation: something that could not be un-invented, but only managed, deferred, or threatened. Responsibility became abstract, distributed across institutions, committees, and doctrines of deterrence. No single creator remained accountable. Shelley would have recognized this immediately. Victor’s flight from the creature anticipates the bureaucratic dispersal of guilt that followed 1945: a world in which everyone participated in creation, and no one could be said to be responsible for its consequences.

This distinction feels newly urgent again in the age of artificial intelligence. We build systems designed to learn, adapt, and exceed their initial parameters, then describe their behavior as though it were weather—emergent, surprising, beyond anyone’s control. Victor repeatedly frames the creature as something that “escaped” him. Nuclear strategists spoke of escalation chains. Contemporary AI discourse speaks of runaway systems. In each case, responsibility dissolves into process.

Most film adaptations struggle here. They prefer lightning to negligence, laboratories to ethics, the moment of animation to the long duration of responsibility. The monster becomes the problem, not the act of turning away.

This tendency was established early. James Whale’s films Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) fixed the image of the mute, lumbering monster in the popular imagination, prioritizing spectacle over moral continuity. Later reinterpretations shifted tone but rarely premise. Terence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) emphasized transgression and horror, while Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) attempted a more faithful adaptation, restoring the creature’s speech and self-awareness, though still struggling to dramatize responsibility as duration rather than event. Each version stages creation vividly. Few remain with its aftermath.

The latest return arrives in Frankenstein (2025), written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, a filmmaker whose career has been preoccupied with abandoned creatures and moral asymmetries. Premiering in late 2025 and released globally shortly thereafter, del Toro’s version understands Shelley less as Gothic origin story and more as ethical residue. His Frankenstein is not fascinated by the moment of animation so much as by what follows it: the loneliness of the created, the cowardice of the creator, and the slow institutionalization of irresponsibility. That this adaptation emerges now, amid accelerating debates about artificial intelligence, feels less coincidental than diagnostic.

Survival as an unsanctioned sequel.

The renewed relevance of Frankenstein was made unmistakably visible two years earlier in Oppenheimer (2023), directed by Christopher Nolan, a film that functioned, whether intentionally or not, as the twentieth century’s most literal Frankenstein adaptation. J. Robert Oppenheimer does not flee his creation in the manner of Victor Frankenstein, but he also does not remain with it. Instead, responsibility is dissolved into committees, hearings, security clearances, and historical inevitability. Nolan’s film is striking precisely because the bomb never becomes a monster in the conventional sense; it does not rampage, rebel, or malfunction. It simply exists, reorganizing the moral universe around it. Like Shelley’s creature, the bomb speaks only indirectly, through geopolitical doctrine, deterrence logic, and permanent anxiety. What Oppenheimer dramatizes is not the danger of scientific hubris, but the psychic toll of having created something that cannot be recalled and can only be lived with, abstractly, indefinitely. In this sense, the film occupies the space between Shelley’s novel and contemporary AI discourse: a portrait of creation that succeeds technically while failing ethically, and of a creator who survives long enough to understand that explanation is not the same as responsibility.

In the novel, the creature is not born violent. He becomes violent through accumulation: rejection, isolation, misrecognition. He educates himself by listening from outside a cottage, absorbing Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and other classics. He understands himself through literature before society allows him to exist socially. This remains one of Shelley’s most radical gestures. The monster is not pre-social. He is hyper-social, trained, educated, and shaped by culture before being rejected by it.

Cinema has rarely known what to do with this literacy. Film prefers the mute monster, the malfunctioning body, the visual shock. It prefers immediacy over interiority. Yet Shelley’s creature is frightening not because he is strong, but because he is reflective. He knows precisely what has been done to him, and what has been withheld.

What happens when creation is met with care instead of abandonment.

Here the parallel to AI sharpens further. We train systems on the accumulated language, images, and decisions of the world, then recoil when they reflect that world back to us with unsettling clarity. Like the atomic bomb, AI does not merely threaten destruction; it threatens reorganization—of labor, of authorship, of responsibility itself. And like Frankenstein’s creature, it becomes the surface onto which creators project fear, denial, and moral outsourcing.

Shelley structures Frankenstein as a series of nested testimonies: Robert Walton’s Arctic letters frame Victor Frankenstein’s account, which in turn encloses the creature’s own narrative. Each voice is articulate, self-justifying, and convinced of its moral seriousness. Yet this abundance of speech produces not clarity but displacement. Responsibility is passed inward and outward, never settled. Walton listens, Victor explains, the creature pleads, and action is perpetually postponed. What emerges is not a failure of communication but a failure of commitment. Explanation substitutes for obligation; narration stands in for care.

This architecture is not merely a literary device. It models a form of ethical evasion that would later become institutionalized. In the postwar nuclear world, responsibility for the atomic bomb was distributed across scientists, generals, politicians, and abstract doctrines of deterrence. Everyone could explain their role; no one could be said to be responsible for the whole. Oversight replaced custody. Management replaced moral presence. The weapon was monitored, theorized, regulated, but never truly owned.

The same logic now governs contemporary debates about artificial intelligence. Systems are audited, reviewed, aligned, and governed through layers of committees and protocols, yet no one remains answerable in the way Shelley demands. Like Victor, creators retreat into process. They speak fluently about safeguards and unintended consequences while avoiding the more uncomfortable question of duration: Who stays with what has been made once it begins to act, to speak, to alter the world? Shelley’s nested narratives anticipated a modern condition in which accountability is endlessly deferred through structure itself—a world dense with explanation, yet eerily devoid of responsibility.

Breath returns, meaning does not.

The modern fascination with Frankenstein often misidentifies the monster as the danger. Shelley’s text insists otherwise. The true horror is not that the creature demands recognition, but that recognition is so easily refused. He does not ask to dominate humanity or replace it. He asks for limits that acknowledge his existence, and for a creator willing to remain present.

This is why Frankenstein is not ultimately a technological novel. It is a social one. The laboratory scenes are transitory. The long stretches concern exile, wandering, and the refusal to remain responsible for what has been made. The monster lives where society has decided not to look. So does the bomb, abstracted into doctrine. So do AI systems, buried behind interfaces, institutions, and language.

The novel’s final image, the creature disappearing into the Arctic, offers no reconciliation, no shutdown switch, no moral reset. Only exhaustion. Shelley refuses closure. Damage cannot be undone; responsibility cannot be retroactively claimed.

That is why Frankenstein keeps returning. Not because we are afraid of monsters, or bombs, or intelligent machines, but because we remain unwilling to accept what it means to create something that exceeds us, and then remain answerable to it. Each new adaptation tests whether we are prepared to confront that demand, or whether we will once again blame the creation for the failures of its creator.

Final form: not monstrous, not innocent—simply still here.

The monster does not ask to be loved unconditionally. He asks to be acknowledged as existing. Two centuries after Shelley, and nearly a century after the atomic bomb, this remains an uncomfortably high demand. Frankenstein was never about the future. It was about what happens the moment creation stops being interesting, and responsibility begins. The fact that we keep remaking it suggests that this moment keeps arriving, and that we are still learning how not to turn away.

Chris Hollander (born 1989 in Edinburgh) studied philosophy and cybernetics at the University of Budapest. An early pioneer of artificial intelligence research, he now writes about literature, film, and the ethical afterlives of technological ambition, having concluded that ideas tend to outlive their creators and rarely improve with supervision.

Cover image: Identity assembled under poor lighting, with limited materials.