James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein film, starring Boris Karloff as a childlike, lumbering brute with bolts in his neck, overshadows Mary Shelley’s foundational 1818 source novel in popular culture.
Whale’s embellishments include the use of lightning to give life to the creature, Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant (“Fritz”, but “Igor” in most adaptations) and the dilemma of a normal or criminal brain. None of these are in Shelley’s novel (and Whale took them from a 1927 play by Peggy Webling), but they forever populate our perception of the Frankenstein tale.
Guillermo del Toro’s new Frankenstein film also differs significantly from the source text, and employs the stormy electricity Whale inseparably added to the formula, but del Toro’s dark fairytale instincts are ideal for exploring an element of the monster true to the book but rarely seen on-screen: his great intellect and pathos.
Jacob Elordi as Frankenstein’s monster is the karmic opposite of Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok in Nosferatu: both are very attractive men playing living corpses under heavy prosthetics, but while Skarsgård’s Orlok is a creature of pestilence and hate, Elordi’s monster is achingly sympathetic. Elordi portrays an unstoppable, terrifying force in the sick action moments, but a gentle, kind and extremely intelligent being when given the chance, with a deep bitterness toward his callous creator Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), his own inability to die and a world that rejects, hurts and hunts him.
In a beautiful, poignant sequence with a heartbreaking end, the monster becomes the unseen benefactor of a family in the woods, who gratefully dub him ‘the Spirit of the Forest’, and befriends the family’s kindly blind grandfather. This may seem like a whimsical addition, but most of it is drawn from the book.
del Toro’s Gothic fairytale vision revels in vibrant art direction and scientific discovery, and Victor morphs from a roguish genius to a repugnant neglectful parent. Del Toro’s biggest addition to the plot concerns Victor’s family life, with a strict father and an adoring mother who dies in childbirth. Victor’s resolution to conquer death after this loss makes his mistreatment of his monster all the more shocking: he achieved his goal and honoured his mother by reviving dead matter, but all he can do is chain and mock his creation.
del Toro’s monster is much less vengefully homicidal than Shelley’s – he doesn’t deliberately kill Victor’s family or frame an innocent maid – but the hatred between him and Victor is undiluted from page to screen.
del Toro has a lifelong affinity with monsters. As a Mexican Catholic, he had great difficulty reconciling the religious state of grace with the darkness of the world. ‘I felt there was a deep cleansing allowing for imperfection through the figure of a monster. Monsters are the patron saints of imperfection.’ His monster, granted an articulate voice so rarely heard in adaptations, is scary but immensely tragic (and therefore book-accurate), and highlights the imperfections of his creator and their cruel world.
I hope del Toro directs for Doctor Who someday. If anything, del Toro is a better fit to direct Who than Peter Jackson, who was once rumoured to be directing an episode, and the Cybermen Who villains are more than a little Frankensteinian.
Going back to old films populating future adaptations, I am unshakeably certain that del Toro drew upon The Terminator, of all inspirations, for his monster.
Both Frankenstein’s monster, a patchwork of corpses brought to life with electricity, and the Arnie T-800 Terminator, a skeletal robot with an outer layer of skin and muscle, are beings somewhere between living and non-living. The monster’s grey pallor resembles the T-800 as his skin starts to die and decompose. The way the monster’s eye – just one – glows a faint orange in some lighting and angles resembles how the T-800 often looks after taking heavy damage, with the skin around one eye torn or burned away to reveal the glowing red mechanical eye beneath.
The icy action scenes bookending the film feel particularly Terminator-coded. Muskets barely slow the monster down as he storms toward the ship where Victor is hiding, but the way a couple of blasts from a blunderbuss finally (if briefly) incapacitate the monster is very reminiscent of Kyle Reese subduing the T-800 with his shotgun in the Tech Noir nightclub scene.
Toward the end of Frankenstein, the monster taunts Victor with a stick of dynamite, wondering if it can kill him. The dynamite fails to kill the monster, but mortally wounds Victor in the process. With how much the dynamite looks like Kyle’s makeshift explosives, and how the monster holds the stick to his chest, I can’t be the only one who vividly saw in this scene Kyle dying after blowing the T-800 in half with a pipe-bomb in The Terminator’s factory climax.
del Toro is a huge nerd (I say this with love, as a fellow nerd) who loves anime and video games. As a filmmaker who can shift fluidly and fluently from a technothriller slasher to superheroes, a dark adventure in Francoist Spain, mech-monster fights and The Creature From The Black Lagoon reworked as romance, paying homage to The Terminator in a Frankenstein movie is definitely something del Toro would do.
del Toro cites Frankenstein as the most important book of his life. ‘So you know if I get to it, whenever I get to it, it will be the right way,’ he declared in 2012. Del Toro views his Frankenstein film as the culmination of his life as an artist, just as Denis Villeneuve had long dreamed of adapting Dune.
With his new film, Guillermo del Toro brings his own welcome ideas to Frankenstein while scrupulously honouring Mary Shelley’s book with a sympathetic, uncommonly smart monster, but the Terminator tributes add an unexpected, exciting layer to the presentation and action.
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Cast: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth
Writer: Guillermo del Toro, (based on Frankenstein by Mary Shelley)
Producers: J. Miles Dale, Guillermo del Toro, Scott Stuber
Composer: Alexandre Desplat
Cinematographer: Dan Laustsen
Editor: Evan Schiff
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