Monsters of the Anthropocene

Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Frankenstein’ reduces Mary Shelley’s novel to a one-dimensional warning about technological hubris.

By Deborah R. CoenFebruary 9, 2026

• SF

• Science & Technology

• Film

RELEASED THEATRICALLY in October 2025, and nominated for nine Academy Awards, Guillermo del Toro’s grisly film Frankenstein updates Mary Shelley’s novel to address the technological hubris of the 21st century. Victor Frankenstein’s goal is no longer just to create life, as in the novel, but also to outwit death. Shelley’s monster had superhuman strength but was as vulnerable emotionally and physically as any other mortal. By contrast, del Toro’s unhappy monster cannot die: Frankenstein’s crime is now to have bestowed life without end. It’s a clever commentary on the transhumanist quest for immortality by means of artificial intelligence. In its bluntness, however, the film sacrifices much of what makes Shelley’s writings relevant today. Del Toro’s cartoonish world can’t do justice to Shelley’s nuanced reflections on mortality, conflict, the limits of modern science, and the nature of human responsibilities to past and future generations.

Del Toro transposes the 1818 novel to the era of the Crimean War (1853–56), Europeans’ first experience of industrialized warfare. Victor Frankenstein’s (Oscar Isaac) financial backer is an arms dealer (Christoph Waltz) for whom the war is a jackpot. This is a world ruled by violence. We watch Dr. Frankenstein select his monster’s body parts from a battlefield piled high with corpses. It seems inevitable that the monster will learn that violence is the way of the world. To drive the lesson home, del Toro invents a scene in which wolves descend on a sheep pen.

By contrast, in Shelley’s novel, we meet characters who are building harmonious communities. While the Frankenstein of the film is the son of an autocratic prince, the novel’s version comes from a family with a distinguished record of civic service in republican Geneva. Frankenstein’s first tragic error is to abandon this legacy, neglecting both public and familial duties. In the film, as in the novel, the Creature learns about human ethics by secretly observing the domestic life of a loving rural family. But this lesson loses its value in the face of the film’s relentless brutality.

Shelley, too, grew up in a Europe ravaged by war. She witnessed the toll of the Enclosure Movement on the English peasantry, and she learned of Thomas Malthus’s argument that scarcity invariably begets conflict. And yet her fiction posited a counterargument—a human instinct for mutual aid, which could be mobilized during catastrophic times.

Frankenstein was her response to the “year without a summer,” 1816, as literary critic Gillen D’Arcy Wood has explained. Unbeknownst to Europeans, a volcano had erupted in Indonesia. Its ash, which spread far and wide, reflected solar radiation back into space, shifting temperature gradients and storm patterns. All over the world, people were facing bizarre if not catastrophic weather, bringing with it flooding, famine, and disease. Mary Shelley, her husband Percy, and Lord Byron were in the Swiss Alps, hoping to take in the summer scenery. Instead, they lived through the wettest summer that Switzerland had experienced since a handful of Swiss naturalists began to collect data in the mid-18th century. Byron dramatized this episode in his poem “Darkness” (1816), in which a threatening atmosphere inspires a war of all against all. Writing just a year after Napoleon’s surrender, Byron called up vivid images of mutual destruction as humans battled over dwindling resources:

War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left.

Like Byron’s poem, Shelley’s novel takes place in a threatening atmosphere. The film is true to the novel in its chilly landscapes of Arctic and Alpine ice. Unlike Byron, however, Shelley used these forbidding backdrops to underscore her characters’ yearnings for human warmth and companionship. Contra Malthus, she argued that the experience of environmental threat can forge bonds of solidarity.

Shelley returned to this theme in her 1826 novel The Last Man, another story of mutual aid in the face of disaster. More explicitly than Frankenstein, The Last Man showed how civic and familial obligations can exert a moral influence. Verney, the titular character, dedicates himself to building a community of survivors as a pandemic ravages Europe. Throughout the novel, he repeatedly reminds his dwindling fellow beings of their dependence on each other:

“My friends,” I said, “our risk is common; our precautions and exertions shall be common also.” […]

The well-being of each included the prosperity of all. […]

[T]he race of man had lost in fact all distinction of rank. […]

We had no station among us, but that which benevolence and prudence gave; no distinction save between the living and the dead.

Once they recognize their mutual dependence, Shelley’s characters work together to find a means of survival. Del Toro’s film, by contrast, depicts a darkly Malthusian world of conflict over scarce resources.

This bleak vision is accentuated by the film’s use of dim light, smoke, steam, and diffusion filters to create an appropriately “Gothic atmosphere.” This artistry earned it nominations for best cinematography and production design. But what was the significance of such an atmosphere for Shelley? In Shelley’s day, the word atmosphere had only recently acquired an aesthetic sense. Poking fun at her own art, she listed the ingredients of a fearful atmosphere: “solitude, flapping curtains, rushing wind, a long and dusky passage, an half open door.” She knew that readers experienced a shiver of dread upon reading such a passage whether or not they believed in ghosts. “What is the meaning of this feeling?” Shelley asked, although she had described the atmosphere and not the feeling, as if the feeling inhered in the atmosphere itself. In this way, she anticipated recent theories of atmosphere as a space of affective experience. The affect theorists of the first decade of the 21st century used atmosphere metaphorically to mean a culturally constituted “structure of feeling” located between, rather than within, individuals. Since then, the convergence of climate change impacts, Black Lives Matter, and COVID-19 has inspired affect theorists to take the atmosphere metaphor literally. Doing so raises important questions about the historical specificity and political significance of elemental encounters.

If we think of atmosphere merely as a matter of lighting and special effects, we miss its moral significance for Shelley. Between 1815 and 1822, she lost three of her four children, her half sister, and then her husband. In her grief, she focused on sensing the presence of the dead in the exhalations they had left behind. Reunited with her favorite writing desk, she observed that her dead children had “breathed this air.” In the weeks after Percy’s drowning, the “gentle air” under an Italian holly tree “spoke so vividly” of him. Soon after, she wrote of the atmosphere’s record of him in its scents, sounds, and refractions of light:

Pugnano’s trees, beneath whose shade he stood,
The pools reflecting Pisa’s old pine wood,
The fireflies’ beams, the aziola’s cry
All breathe his spirit which can never die.

Atmospheric sensitivity, often derided as a feminine weakness, appears here as a strength. As Shelley showed, the atmosphere can mediate connections that transcend time and place. The renowned inventor Charles Babbage echoed her insight a decade later: “The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or even whispered.” Evidently, Mary Shelley’s whisper was loud enough for Babbage to hear but not to cite.

As she saw it, the atmosphere, “the yet unshackled ministration of the winds,” was one of science’s final frontiers. Scientists had only recently worked out its chemical composition, and storm forecasting by means of telegraphy was still a generation away. Shelley’s contemporaries were confident nonetheless that science would teach them how to control the atmosphere or at least protect against it. Inspired by the bizarre weather of 1816, the Swiss Natural Sciences Society launched a prize competition to answer the following: “Is it true that our higher alpine regions have been turning into wilderness during the last few years? What are the causes of this and how could one take preventive measures?” As enlightened men of science, the prize committee was looking for explanations in terms of natural, “material” causes. Supernatural explanations of the weird weather—such as appeared in Swiss newspapers at the time—had no place in their science. But Shelley maintained interest in the agency of the immaterial, in the sense of what escaped science’s detection.

Although Shelley never saw a ghost, she argued that the atmosphere’s influence could not be explained in strictly material terms. In her 1824 essay “On Ghosts,” she recalled walking through a house that had belonged to a dead friend and becoming aware of his lingering presence: “[H]is breath had mingled with that atmosphere, his step had been on those stones […] I trembled, awe-struck and fearful.” This atmosphere had been shaped by a history of human presence, which Shelley described in material terms: the air had cycled through her friend’s body; his feet had weathered the surface of the stones. Her susceptibility to this atmosphere was simultaneously physical (“I trembled”) and emotional (“awe-struck and fearful”). Even science could not draw a firm line between matter and spirit, body and mind.

In The Last Man, Shelley depicts the atmosphere as a medium of planetary interdependence for those who know how to read it. Verney’s quest to find other survivors takes him to Rome, on the assumption that all roads lead there. At first, he is entranced by Rome’s atmosphere: “[T]he voice of dead time, in still vibrations, is breathed from these dumb things, animated and glorified as they were by man.”

But this Eurocentric illusion of Rome’s universality and eternity is quickly dispelled. Verney realizes his mistake: he “had been a fool to remain in Rome all this time.” If he intends to find a companion, he will have to “visit the whole extent of earth.” The novel closes as he sets sail for Africa. As Shelley points out, becoming a “wanderer,” a seafarer, means “obeying the breezes of heaven.” It requires practical knowledge of the atmosphere. And yet she chose to close the novel by invoking a complementary way of reading the skies: “I shall witness all the variety of appearance, that the elements can assume—I shall read fair augury in the rainbow—menace in the cloud—some lesson or record dear to my heart in everything.” If Verney is to adapt to a transformed earth, Shelley implies, he will need to attend both to the atmosphere’s physical power and to its cultural and spiritual meanings.

In our own era of climate models and emissions trading, it might seem that science has succeeded in rendering the atmosphere in strictly material terms. We should be wary of that goal. Following the anthropologist Mayanthi Fernando, materialism is the fantasy that nothing can escape the control of technology. Fernando observes that secular academics engage with the immaterial at the level of metaphor, while refusing to acknowledge the immaterial as a constraint on human agency. As she puts it, commentators on climate change drop the notion of relationality if “being in relation means being bound, even subjected, to another.”

Shelley, on the other hand, experienced the immaterial as an obligation. This attitude did not detract from her appreciation of modern science, but it helped her recognize its limits. She could teach her readers to sense the atmosphere as science could not: as a medium of shared experience across time as well as space. Not only was the atmosphere a space of shared affect, as it is for contemporary affect theorists; it also communicated duties toward both past and future generations. In a tragic irony, while Shelley was writing, Indigenous communities were struggling to protect their sacred lands in fulfillment of their own duties to their ancestors. The novel mentions that Frankenstein’s monster cried when he read the fate of North America’s Native population.

Del Toro’s film reduces Shelley’s story to a one-dimensional warning about technological hubris. But Frankenstein was as much about positive human duties as about transgressions. Her gothic atmosphere was not just a shiver-inducing device but also a metaphor of connectedness. At the very moment when Europeans were stealing ancestral lands to build coal-powered empires, Shelley was offering a vocabulary for perceiving the atmosphere in terms of the obligations of the living to those who came before and those who will come after.