Guillermo del Toro has been shaping his vision for Victor Frankenstein’s monster since he was 11 years old, when Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 Gothic novel became his Bible, as he put it in a conversation in August.
“Why is it made of many parts?” he recalled wondering as a boy. “I started thinking about the logic of that.”
Now, the filmmaker, with three Oscars to his name, has finally manifested his dream. His “Frankenstein” (out Oct. 17 in theaters and Nov. 7 on Netflix), reinterprets both the myth and the monster, which unlike many before it, feels newly born rather than repaired. Yes, that means no stitches.
“We didn’t want it to feel like an accident victim,” he said, referring to his collaboration with Mike Hill, also a “Frankenstein” acolyte and the film’s creature designer. “We wanted it to have the purity or translucency of almost like a newborn soul,” del Toro said, “to follow it from being a newborn soul into being — an ‘I think therefore I am’ sort of a human.”
Not to say that previous interpretations, what del Toro called “North Stars in our lifetime,” didn’t figure into the vision. There’s the silhouette of the military wardrobe that Bernie Wrightson used to illustrate the monster for Mary Shelley’s book in a famous edition printed in the 1980s; the dead stare of Christopher Lee in “The Curse of Frankenstein” from 1957; some of the religious aura surrounding Boris Karloff’s monster from the 1930s, perhaps the image — a lumbering monster with scars and neck bolts — that surfaces in most minds.
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