Trailers for 1931’s Frankenstein — the classic monster movie starring Boris Karloff as the Monster and Colin Clive as his eponymous creator, Henry Frankenstein — billed Karloff’s lumbering, bolt-necked creature as “the greatest horror the screen has ever known.” But the Universal Studios horror movie, inarguably the most iconic and definitive version of the man-made monster on screen, wasn’t exactly faithful to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
In Shelley’s 1818 novel, the life-giving scientist was Victor Frankenstein, and the monster spoke eloquently, at one point telling his progenitor, “Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.”
RELATED: Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein Reveals Oscar Isaac’s Wild New Look
Expect to hear such soliloquies in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which stars Oscar Isaac (Moon Knight) in the title role and Jacob Elordi (Priscilla) as the Monster, a sentient, sensitive, and sympathetic figure as depicted in the original text.
“Somebody asked me the other day, does it have really scary scenes?” del Toro said on stage at the Cannes Film Festival (via Variety). “For the first time, I considered that. It’s an emotional story for me. It’s as personal as anything. I’m asking a question about being a father, being a son… I’m not doing a horror movie — ever. I’m not trying to do that.”
Added Alexandre Desplat, the Oscar-winning composer of del Toro’s Best Picture winner The Shape of Water, “Guillermo’s cinema is very lyrical, and my music is rather lyrical too. So I think the music of Frankenstein will be something very lyrical and emotional… I’m not trying to write horrific music.”
Del Toro went on to add that he and Desplat are “finding the emotion” in the Frankenstein score. “And what I can say is, for me, it’s an incredibly emotional movie.”
Desplat likened it to The Shape of the Water, where “the creature is frightening during the first 15 minutes and then becomes a very moving character.”
“The first time I thought I was going to avenge the creature was when Marilyn Monroe is coming out [of the movies] in The Seven Year Itch with Tom Ewell, and she says the creature just needed somebody to like him,’” del Toro noted. “I fell in love with Marilyn, and I fell in love with the creature in that scene at a very early age. And I thought, you know, all we have is people that look at people the wrong way. That’s what we have in this world.”
Frankenstein — also starring Mia Goth (MaXXXine) as Elizabeth Lavenza, Christoph Waltz (Inglorious Basterds) as Dr. Septimus Pretorius, Lars Mikkelsen (The Witcher) as Captain Anderson, and Ralph Ineson (The Fantastic Four: First Steps) as Professor Kempre — is slated to be released by Netflix this fall. The streamer will present a sneak peek at the film during the Netflix Tudum 2025 livestream event on May 31.
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