No director has more famous unrealised projects than Guillermo del Toro. At the Mountains of Madness, a Lovecraftian epic once set to star Tom Cruise, was shelved because of budgetary and rating concerns. The Mexican auteur’s Justice League Dark, Haunted Mansion reboot and Hellboy III were all lost to development hell.
Del Toro’s sketches for The Hobbit, which he was set to direct in 2008 before that project drifted back to Peter Jackson, tantalisingly reframe Tolkien’s epic as a direct response to the first World War. These unmade films have only amplified del Toro’s mythical status as a cinematic visionary.
“You never walk away,” he says. “You get dragged away. I’ve written or co-written 42 screenplays and directed 13 films. That means nearly 30 projects never got made – or someone else made them, like The Hobbit. Over 25 scripts I’ve written never saw the light of day.
“Some you outgrow. Some weren’t yours to begin with. And some you just hold on to until someone finally gets it. Pinocchio took 20 years to make. And then Netflix said yes. Sometimes you just wait. And wait. And then the door opens.”
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Del Toro’s Frankenstein might have been another might-have-been. The director’s quest to adapt Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel has spanned more than 30 years, marked by false dawns and studio politics. First announced in the early 1990s, the project was repeatedly shelved because of financial concerns, creative differences or changing industry vogues.
“When I came to Netflix, I’d already been working on an animated series with them for about eight years. They said, ‘Why don’t you do feature films here?’ I showed them the bucket-list projects I’d been sitting on – Frankenstein was one – and they greenlit them.”
Growing up Catholic in the city of Guadalajara, del Toro was surrounded by the gaudy iconography, ritual and fatalism of his faith – aesthetics that would shape his cinematic sensibility in films such as Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone and The Shape of Water.
“The pageantry of Catholicism is very present in my work,” he says. “And that’s one of the biggest differences between me and Mary Shelley. She was a Protestant girl from England. I’m a Catholic boy from Mexico. Big difference in temperament.
“But the fatalism in romanticism – that sense of dread and acceptance – that’s very Mexican. We dress it up in passion and colour, but it’s there. Mexican Catholicism leans heavily into parables of violence, suffering and redemption. I wrote Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark with that in mind,“ he says, referring to the 2019 film he wrote the story for. It’s part of our cultural DNA.”
His mystical and macabre designs for Frankenstein were influenced by St Bartholomew Flayed, a 16th-century statue in Milan Cathedral that depicts the skinned Christian martyr, and by Le Génie du Mal, or Evil Genius, Guillaume Geefs’s statue of a fallen angel in Liège Cathedral, from the mid-19th century. The links between del Toro’s movie monsters and his faith were there from the beginning.
“I first encountered Frankenstein as a Catholic boy,” he says. “I remember watching Frankenstein after Mass on a Sunday when I was about seven. Even then I connected with the metaphysical aspects of the creature. I identified with it.
“I thought of Pinocchio and Frankenstein as two stories about fathers who create children they don’t fully understand and then release them into a world they haven’t explained. That felt very personal to me, like my relationship with my own father.
“And as the decades pass something curious happens: you become the father. You have your own kids. And yet you still behave like a son, emotionally. So then the story transforms. It becomes about the lineage of mistakes passed from father to son, generation to generation. There’s regret. There’s depth. You gain a kind of telescope into the story.”
Del Toro remains a completist fan of Frankenstein films, especially the three Universal productions from the 1930s: Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein. He has love, too, for the Hammer films starring Peter Cushing as Frankenstein.
“His baron is a sociopath, which I find fascinating,” del Toro says. “Christopher Lee’s performance in The Curse of Frankenstein is also terrifying. He plays the creature like reanimated tissue, completely soulless.
“There’s a beautiful two-part miniseries called Frankenstein: The True Story, written by Christopher Isherwood. It has nothing to do with the book, but it captures the spirit – more ETA Hoffmann and Oscar Wilde than Mary Shelley, but still profoundly romantic. And, of course, I love Udo Kier’s Frankenstein.”
Del Toro’s scholarly variation is a departure from the source material. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which the author wrote while she was pregnant, is weighted with maternal anxiety and the horrors of a world bereft of motherhood.
Victor Frankenstein’s mother dies early in the text, leaving him orphaned and triggering a lifelong need to recreate life. Elizabeth, his beloved, also remains without maternal guidance. Victor’s act of creating the monster “without a woman” becomes a monstrous anti‐birth, a scientific attack on motherhood.
That absence, in turn, fuels the Creature’s sense of abandonment and rage. “No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses,” the Creature laments.
“There are many parallels between my own biography and Mary Shelley’s,” del Toro says. “It’s quite eerie, actually. Three of her novels deal with almost diabolical father figures – Mathilda and her final two works.
“I think the novel is more about the absence of a mother, though. Mary’s own mother died just 11 days after giving birth to her. My own mother had multiple miscarriages. I was a precarious birth. I also lost siblings at childbirth – just like Mary. Some of her children died so early that they were buried without names or baptism.
“That fusion of birth and death, that’s what the novel is about for me. And that’s very much in line with the spirit of romanticism – the entanglement of love, life and death. Frankenstein is a banquet. It’s so full of anxiety and yearning for answers that you can find almost anything in it.”
The director’s innovations include a new character, Harlander, a munitions dealer, played by Christoph Waltz. Victor, now played with manic energy by Oscar Isaac, is no longer engaged to Elizabeth (Mia Goth). She is instead betrothed to his brother, William (Felix Kammerer), although this does not prevent her from striking up a romantic attachment to the Creature (Jacob Elordi).
Elordi brings empathy and a dash of Edward Scissorhands to a role that was played wordlessly by Boris Karloff in James Whale’s classic Universal film from 1931.
“The goal isn’t to sing the same song; it’s to sing it with my own voice,” del Toro says. “The most well-known version of Frankenstein comes from a rather peculiar stage play from 1927, which Universal based their film on. To be faithful to the book, I believe, you have to be as biographical as Mary Shelley was. When you read her novel you see her life. You see the echoes of her time with Percy Shelley, her exposure to galvanic experiments at her father’s house ...
“The changes I made are numerous but always in service of this film. One was bringing the context of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars into the story. They were the backdrop to Shelley’s romantic movement. Lord Byron actually rode through the battlefield of Waterloo.
“We fused Elizabeth with Mary Shelley herself, made her an avatar, full of moral intelligence and modern questions, often more advanced than the men around her. I reimagined Victor and his brother in a Cain-and-Abel dynamic. Instead of the monster killing William as a child, as in the book, I made the creature a gentle force.”
That gentle force makes the movie. One early review highlights Elordi’s “quiet watchfulness to this Frankenstein’s monster ... He becomes the soul of a movie that may not have had one without him”.
As with Shelley’s book, del Toro’s film hinges on a shift from Victor’s perspective to that of the Creature.
The second half is more like a fairy tale. It’s shot and lit that way: soft, natural, quiet. The Creature is guided through the world by animals – ravens, deer, mice, wolves – and begins to understand the world’s violence in a very innocent, painful way. The camera style reflects that: it’s more static, more observational. The colours are muted: earth, stone, straw, moss.
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While del Toro was shooting in Scotland, he stayed in a “haunted” hotel room vacated by his producer, who was scared by “electrical and physical occurrences”. Unhappily, he hasn’t even got a lively nightmare to report.
“I don’t really dream much,” he says. “My dreams are usually quite mundane – boring, even. There’s only one image in the film that came directly from a dream: a burning man. Most of the imagery in my films doesn’t come from dreams. It comes from years of sketching, reading, and absorbing stories.
“That said, when I was younger, I used to dream of sharks chasing me. That was the extent of the drama. Now I wish my subconscious were that co-operative.”
Frankenstein is in cinemas from Friday, October 24th, and on Netflix from Friday, November 7th
