This past weekend, I attended the annual conference for the American Academy of Religion in Boston. I was grateful to attend a panel discussion titled “The Difference the Resurrection Makes” featuring Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas as one of the panelists. Oddly, in the midst of the panel, I found myself thinking about the recent adaptation of Frankenstein.
I read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein many years ago and have been frustrated with the film adaptations ever since. They never seemed to understand the story, focusing on the ghoulishness and the Halloween-ready images. So I am happily, even joyously, here to say that Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (released in November 2025) is an adaptation I believe is both faithful as well as progressive. In fact, it helped me connect some ideas about redemptive hope and what Kelly Brown Douglas referred to as a “fugitive act.”
The story of Frankenstein has often been diluted to the mere hubris of the doctor. And yes, this is the initial and most obvious act of evil in the story—Dr. Frankenstein playing out in a literal and scientific way the very hubris that is often referred to as the “fall” either of Adam and Eve or of John Milton’s Lucifer. Dr. Frankenstein believes he can create life (i.e. become God) and becomes wholly focused on this simple act. But once he has created, his only emotion towards that creation is hatred. Shelley focuses on this for the novel, reminding us that the abandonment of his creature was perhaps an even graver sin. His first action of creation is the perversion of nature, but his more horrific action of abandonment solidifies his place as the true monster of the story.
Yet it is in the Creature’s story that I find so much to learn from. Shelley and del Toro both give important focus on the growth the Creature (whom Shelley has name himself Adam, and so I will refer to him as such). There are scenes that allow us to see Adam’s continued intellectual growth—he learns more words, how to read, and develops a keen sense of logic and rationality. There is also my favorite scene, in both the book and the recent movie, of Adam’s relationship with an old man. The old man, blind, and so unaware of Adam’s “monstrous look,” asks Adam to read to him. They talk, grow close, and eventually Adam understands what it is to be loved by the care the man has given him. These important scenes are so often left out of the typical adaptations and are why we often merely think of a lumbering, low intelligence subhuman when we picture the Creature.
Yet del Toro does make one important shift in his story. At the end, where we see Adam finally catch up to Victor Frankenstein on the ship in the Arctic, the ship captain allows Adam to come on board. Once there, Adam finds out that the captain has heard Victor’s story. Adam then asks to tell his own story, and Victor and the captain listen. After he concludes, Victor Frankenstein asks for forgiveness. He comes to see that his creation is not a monster, but recognizes it is too late for him to make any real amends. His ask of forgiveness is in an awareness that he is dying, and that it is all he has left to offer.
Adam forgives Victor, which some may feel is too optimistic of an ending. But I think this is where del Toro has faithfully updated Shelley’s themes. Because it is not that Dr. Frankenstein has been relieved of the consequences—he has, in fact, suffered greatly. It is instead that creator and creation have been reconciled through the act of risk and relationship. It is this connection that I thought of while I listened to the panel. Rev. Dr. Brown Douglas described hope in connection to the horrors we see perpetuated in the world today. She said despair often paralyzes us, and that this is precisely what we ought not to do. Instead, we ought to live in a “fugitive act” of hope—that this is the belief that God’s future is still possible. Hope is living free—something Adam came to realize in letting go of his despair. Hope is also, as Rev. Dr. Brown Douglas stated, “subversive remembering.” It is the act of sharing history, story, and memory and then living in the freedom of the imagination of a better future.
This fugitive act of hope is what Adam gives us. Like God, Adam had the last word and allowed that word to be a redemptive love. It is the redemption that was finally possible for Dr. Frankenstein, and it should guide us to our own ability to fight for redemptive hope in a world in need of it.
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