Is it a sad indictment of modern cinema that it takes a mega-streamer to come to the party to be able to let a celebrated filmmaker like Guillermo del Toro tell one of the greatest gothic-horror stories of all time – Frankenstein?
Frankenstein has long been a passion project for del Toro. He has wanted to make it for nearly as long as At The Mountains Of Madness.
The often-told story is based on Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley.
She was inspired by her travels through Europe in 1815, along the river Rhine in Germany, and to Gernsheim. Nearby was Frankenstein Castle, where, about a century earlier, Johann Konrad Dippel, an alchemist, had engaged in controversial experiments.
She also Geneva, Switzerland, where much of her story would take place.
Fashionable interests at the time included Galvanism and the occult. While staying with her lover and future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816, they were joined by John Polidori and Lord Byron. They set themselves a competition to see who could write the best horror story, and Shelley was the clear winner, drawing on her inspiration from her travels to create Frankenstein.
It told the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. The first edition was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when Shelley was only 20. Her name first appeared in the second edition, which was published in Paris in 1821.
For the del Toro adaptation, we have been promised greater focus on the Doctor rather than his creation, and while it will remain a horror story, it will also aim to unlock the emotional core of Shelley’s novel.
In this version, Dr. Pretorious (Christoph Waltz) needs to track down Frankenstein’s Monster (Jacob Elordi), believed to have died in a fire 40 years before, in order to continue the experiments of Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac).
Goth plays Victor’s fiancée Elizabeth Lavenza, while Lars Mikkelsen, Ralph Ineson, David Bradley, Felix Kammerer, and Charles Dance also star.
The project was filmed late last year in Toronto. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein lands on Netflix in November.
