A new $150m budget Guillermo Del Toro Frankenstein movie has dropped on Netflix and many will be scratching their heads as to why.
I was amazed to find that Frankenstein’s monster has appeared in over 400 feature films and nearly 300 TV episodes. The monster is thus hands down the most popular horror character (and/or the most featured) of all time.
All this of course begs the question why it would be remade again for so much money. A journalist at the Venice Film Festival asked the director if it was about AI, which Del Toro shut down. But hmmm, it’s hard to think there wasn’t a Netflix executive somewhere who thought the timing kind of adds up.
Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is over 200 years old and it’s easy to underestimate how influential it is. It is the archetypal horror story of a creator being destroyed by their creation. It thus has influence over both The Terminator and The Matrix movies, which are amongst the most successful franchises in sci fi, if not the whole of cinema. Jurassic Park? Yep, Frankenstein vibes.
Only monsters play God
The tagline of the new film is Only Monsters Play God. It casts the creator, the titular Victor, as the real monster, rather than the normal plot (told 700+ times) of the monster generally being bad. Misunderstood, sure, but BAD, in capitals.
I won’t ruin the rest of the film, but that tagline feels contemporaneous. We’ve got AI labs all over the world creating their own representations of intelligence, and it’s hard to be a human right now and think there won’t be any adverse effects. From mass job losses to making humans extinct, there’s rather a lot to say about ChatGPT and co.
I’d actually gone into some detail as to why AI taking over the world is such a repeated story in the media and culture in my earlier video - This is How AI Could End Humanity. And with that, I ran through the plot of Frankenstein, and why that story has stuck for more than 200 years.
Little did I know when I made that video that a new movie was being released. When I found out about it, I thought it was rich cultural territory to explore. So I got to one of the few limited theatre screenings in the UK and watched it.
It’s quite good, really. Not a bona fide classic. It’s also not a horror film, which may be disappointing for some. It’s more Edward Scissorhands than Freddy Kruger and the only one wielding sharp metal implements is Victor Frankenstein himself - although he’s not that bad really. Just a bit of an idiot.
I suppose that’s the real warning with it all. It’s all very well being a brilliant 19th century doctor, AI researcher, or even AI user, but it only takes a very marginal piece of idiocy for it all to go horribly wrong.
And so here we are, in 2025, retelling Frankenstein for the 701st time.
