Guillermo del Toro's ‘Frankenstein’ and his lifelong obsession with monsters and human imperfection
The director uses his famous creature features, from 'Pan's Labyrinth' to ‘Pacific Rim’, to critique war, empire, and man's wicked heart
In Guillermo del Toro’s new film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, when Dr Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) demonstrates his method for re-animating dead tissue, the assembled noblemen are outraged. “Ungodly", “an abomination", “a crime against God". A bloody torso strapped to a pair of batteries, twitching and sparking like Luigi Galvani’s electrified frog-legs—a monstrous vision. But as is often the case with del Toro’s films, far bigger monstrosities lie within man’s wicked heart. Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), an arms dealer, promises to supply Frankenstein with body parts harvested from corpses during the ongoing Crimean War, which has proven to be quite profitable for Harlander. The irony is clear—the science of cheating death, sponsored by the military-industrial complex. As Harlander puts it, “The tide of war shall deliver its bounty to our shore."
This sequence underlines two recurring themes in del Toro’s filmography. One is authoritarian or war-mongering empires as villains, like the Francisco Franco regime in Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and The Devil’s Backbone (2001), or a Nazi-Soviet alliance in Hellboy (2004). The second throughline is del Toro’s lifelong obsession with monsters. All his films involve demons, ghosts, fairies and other assorted supernatural creatures, either representing the excesses of empire but just as often, standing in opposition to its conservative values.
Not only do these “monsters" help shape the director’s distinct aesthetic (he’s a master of both practical and computer-generated imagery), they are often far more humanised than del Toro’s human villains. From the start of his career in the early 1990s, the Mexican director has understood that a monster is no more than a semantic vessel for society’s anxieties, insecurities and taboos. In his debut film Cronos (1992), an alchemist is so petrified of death that he makes a machine that turns him into a vampire. In Hellboy: The Golden Army (2008), the Forest God is a gigantic, wrathful ecological deity tossing cars and crushing buildings in a hyper-urban landscape representing climate change.
Marina Warner, an English historian and mythographer, explained the sociological underpinnings of modern-day fictional monsters in her 1994 book Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time: “Millennial turmoil, the disintegration of so many familiar political blocks and the appearance of new national borders, ferocious civil wars, global catastrophes from famine to AIDS, threats of ecological disasters… all these dangers feed fantasies of the monstrous. At the same time, scientific achievements in genetics, reproduction, cosmetic surgery and transplants have raised tough ethical anxieties about the manufacture of new beings."
That last phrase—“the manufacture of new beings"—is evocative of so many del Toro images: the mechanical, tireless Golden Army in Hellboy: The Golden Army, the alchemist’s alabaster second skin in Cronos, and most recently of course, Victor Frankenstein sewing dissonant arms and legs together in a fever dream.
But the phrase is most appropriate, and most satisfyingly applied, in Pacific Rim. In this 2013 film, Earth is threatened by the kaiju (gigantic genetically engineered aliens), and defended by “jaegers", gigantic robots designed to fight the kaiju, with each jaeger being operated by a pair of neurologically-linked human pilots.
In the opening voice-over, there’s a line: “To fight monsters, we created monsters of our own". Together, they represent many of the conflicts Warner laid out in her argument—the kaiju stand for climate change and other ecological anxieties, while the jaeger’s twin-pilot neurological link becomes a narrative tool to discuss everything from generational conflict (when a father and son co-pilot) to cultural divides (when a blond, blue-eyed American cowboy and a young Japanese woman are paired).
Del Toro’s skill at rendering monsters onscreen is as important as his conceptual grasp of them. He studied make-up with the iconic special-effects artist Dick Smith, known for his work on The Exorcist. Following his tutelage with Smith, del Toro worked as a make-up artist and founded his own special-effects firm called Necropia (a premonition of the many reanimated corpses in his future works) in 1985.
Over the past decade, del Toro has also devoted a considerable amount of time to animation; the TV series Trollhunters as well as his animated version of Pinocchio (2022), which used a mixture of traditional and new-age stop-motion techniques.
The director owns a house in Los Angeles dedicated to books, comics, drawings, toys, action figures, film-set props and other pop culture ephemera; it’s called “Bleak House" after the Charles Dickens novel. Small wonder, then, that most of del Toro’s monsters have at least one visual element that stays with you long after the film’s done—the Pale Man’s hands-with-eyes in Pan’s Labyrinth or the Amphibian Man’s distinctive, floral -adjacent gills in The Shape of Water (2017).
In 2016 and 2017, an exhibition featuring del Toro’s collection of drawings, props, artifacts and other movie knick-knacks was displayed first at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and then the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It was called Guillermo del Toro: At Home With Monsters, and a companion book of the same name was released by Simon & Schuster. The book features an in-depth interview with the director that arguably reveals the final piece of the puzzle, as far as del Toro’s monster obsession is concerned— unsurprisingly, it has to do with the Roman Catholic Church.
“A lot of Mexican Catholic dogma, the way it’s taught, it’s about existing in a state of grace, which I found impossible to reconcile with the much darker view of the world and myself, even as a child," Del Toro says. “I couldn’t make sense of impulses like rage or envy and, when I was older, more complex ones, you know. I felt there was a deep, cleansing allowing for imperfection through the figure of a monster. Monsters are the patron saints of imperfection."
Jacob Elordi, who plays the Creature in Frankenstein, certainly took the “patron saint" bit quite seriously, for his performance is gentle and thoughtful, reminiscent of Rory Kinnear’s version of the same character from the TV show Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), who would recite long stretches of Romantic poetry from memory. On the whole, Frankenstein is a reminder of del Toro’s full suite of skills, and his extraordinary talent for monster-lore.
Aditya Mani Jha is a writer based in Delhi.
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