By Giulia Piceni. Image by Cristina González Clavijo
Guillermo del Toro’s new Frankenstein is not simply a cinematic event drenched in visual splendour and immaculate craft, but a cultural pulse-check that forces a reconsideration of why Mary Shelley’s creation resurfaces whenever the world feels fractured, anxious, and hostile to difference. Tracing the novel’s origins amid the provocative restlessness of the Romantics and its sharp critique of social exclusion at the dawn of industrial modernity reveals that our renewed attraction to the Gothic is less an aesthetic indulgence than a telling response to today’s political and emotional climates, where the figure of the monster exposes—with uncomfortable clarity—the brutality of societies that manufacture the “other” only to reject it.
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein: Why Mary Shelley’s Monster Still Matters
There are images that linger in the mind long after the cinema lights rise again, and Guillermo del Toro’s latest adaptation of Frankenstein (available on Netflix) belongs precisely to that rare class of films whose sensory universe remains suspended behind the eyelids: the deliberate color grading that washes every frame in a melancholic iridescence, the sculptural costumes that seem carved out of damp velvet and bruised light, and the carefully engineered choreography of shadows that feels unmistakably his, even though no one truly expected this level of refinement, this level of voluptuous visual thinking, from a director who had already given us worlds bordering on the sublime.
Rediscovering Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Gothic Origins and the Romantic Imagination
Watching Oscar Isaak, Mia Goth, and Jacob Elordi inhabit this aesthetic cathedral of a film, I found myself retracing the path that once led me, at seventeen, to Mary Shelley’s novel; a path made of fascination, curiosity, and the irresistible magnetism of a story conceived during a playful “ghost-writing” night on the shores of Lake Geneva, in a house overcrowded with some of the most incandescent minds of the Romantic era. It is almost unbelievable that a narrative so monumental emerged from what was essentially a youthful challenge between friends: Lord Byron proposing that each guest attempt a ghost story, Polidori drafting what would become The Vampyre, and Mary Shelley, still almost a girl, silently constructing the scaffolding of what would transform the literary landscape of the nineteenth century. That night, which should have dissolved into laughter and self-indulgence, instead produced the two pillars of what we now call Gothic fiction; and it feels strangely symmetrical that, in the same season that del Toro exhumes Frankenstein, Luc Besson brings Dracula back into the theatres, as if the cultural tide had decided to return to the very spring where the Gothic imagination was first crystallised. What strikes me is not merely the coincidence of timing but the fact that audiences, right now, seem unusually drawn to the universe of the Romantics, as if something in our present condition resonates with their obsessions, their unrest, their hunger for meaning in a world that felt, to them as to us, on the brink of disintegration.
Why Dark Aesthetics Are Defining Our Moment
Of course, anyone living through the last year can confirm that goth subculture has erupted across social media with an almost anthropological intensity: everyone wants to be melancholy, everyone wants to be decadent, everyone wants to retreat into black eyeliner and post-punk nostalgia, as if listening to The Cure or Sisters of Mercy could express something about the collective mood that ordinary language fails to capture. A remake like del Toro’s Frankenstein was never going to emerge out of a cultural vacuum; it is the direct product of these darkened aesthetics that have surged upward from the recesses of subculture, gaining traction precisely because they correspond to a reality that feels increasingly unstable, increasingly opaque, and increasingly in need of symbolic structures that can bear the weight of contemporary anxiety.
“Dark aesthetics for dark times”, it is a simplification, yes, but a simplification that, like all clichés, contains a disquieting degree of truth, because it is difficult to be genuinely optimistic in a historical moment that continually strips us of the very tools we once relied on to make sense of the world, pushing many towards a nihilism that masquerades as detachment but is, in truth, a cry for meaning.
In this climate, returning to Frankenstein feels particularly urgent—not because the novel is anti-science (an interpretation so widespread it feels almost institutionalized), but because reducing it to anti-progress rhetoric fundamentally misreads the context in which Mary Shelley was writing.
Inside Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – The Original Gothic Tale
Published in 1818, Mary Shelley’s novel belongs to the first convulsions of industrialisation, a period in which people were being pushed from rural life into the chaotic density of cities, living in slums where hygiene collapsed, class divisions hardened, and the human body itself became a battleground for societal expectations. England at that time was expanding its colonial power, importing cultures, goods, and even bodies, yet refusing to truly accept the “other” it was so eager to collect, creating a climate in which the unfamiliar (whether foreign, poor, or simply different) became the object of fear and moral repulsion. In Frankenstein, the creature is not a simple emblem of scientific hubris; it is the concentrated metaphor of a society that creates categories only to despise those who fall outside them, a society that manufactures its own monsters and then punishes them for the crime of existing.
The novel’s apparent “return to nature” is not a naïve rejection of technology but a philosophical counterpoint shaped by the intellectual environment Mary Shelley inhabited, one steeped in the wanderings around Lake Geneva that she shared with Percy Shelley and Byron. The fact that Victor Frankenstein comes from Geneva is no coincidence, for that region was also home to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose works the Shelleys were reading during their stay and who argued passionately for nature as a sanctuary against the deforming pressures of emerging industrial society. Rousseau believed that the modern world estranged individuals from their innate goodness, and this idea permeates Frankenstein, where nature becomes the only space in which the creature can articulate his humanity before being violently denied it. Seen through this lens, the novel is not a condemnation of science but of the social structures that pervert progress into an instrument of hierarchy, exclusion, and moral failure.
And perhaps this is the overlooked thread that ties the Shelleys, Byron, and Polidori to our present day: these were individuals who lived as if outside their own time, moving through Europe without fixed residences, inhabiting polyamorous relationships, defying institutions, and facing the consequences of intellectual rebellion in a world that punished atheism with prison and considered freedom an almost criminal ambition. They were, in essence, the rockstars of their era, mirroring the New Romantics who resurfaced in the 1980s goth revival and who are now being revived yet again by a generation searching for models of identity that escape the suffocating homogeneity of contemporary culture. This cyclical return of the Romantic imagination, its silhouettes, its darkness, its yearning for transcendence, suggests that our fascination with stories like Frankenstein does not stem from nostalgia but from necessity.
Why Frankenstein and del Toro’s Film Still Matter Today
So what makes Frankenstein so essential right now? First and foremost, it is its insight into the violence societies enact upon those they refuse to see—a violence that today manifests in conflicts echoing old prejudices and resurrecting the logic of the “other” as threat, whether the conflict involves Palestinians and Israelis or any of the countless contemporary arenas where identity becomes a pretext for dehumanization. The creature’s tragedy is not that he was created through science, but that he was denied a place among humans; his alienation arises not from electricity, but from rejection. This is why the novel continues to speak to us: we, too, live in a world that produces isolation, estrangement, and hostility toward difference on an industrial scale, and we recognize in the creature not a monster, but a reflection—an image of all the ways society fails the vulnerable, the marginalized, and those who simply do not fit.
In this sense, del Toro’s film feels like a mirror held up to the present: a reminder that monstrosity is a social construct, that beauty and horror coexist in the same frame, and that the Gothic is returning not merely as an aesthetic trend, but as a language capable of expressing the emotional truth of an era suspended between collapse and reinvention. Frankenstein endures because we need it to endure—because every period of turmoil returns to the stories that help it navigate the darkness—and because, in the long echo of Mary Shelley’s voice, we can still hear the whispered warning that the real monster is never the creation, but the creator who refuses to love it.
