Guillermo del Toro will finally make his version of Mary Shelley’s gothic horror novel, Frankenstein, planned to be a Netflix production. It’s the director’s dream project and one he has been trying to dig out of its development hell grave for more than a decade. He will surely infuse the story with his usual dose of societal issues, think The Shape of Water with its Cold War setting, and more exciting, the Oscar-winning director will probably challenge just how monstrous Frankenstein’s Monster is. Del Toro has talked about doing an adaptation on more than one occasion, his love for the material running far deeper than any grave a mad scientist might rob bodies from. Before handpicking neck bolts and directing a charge of lightning, here is a timeline of the many updates and dead ends in getting del Toro’s project where it is today.
Stitching Together Guillermo del Toro's Past Plans
According to Gizmodo in January 2008, del Toro had done Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, with the plans to turn his attention to making a four-hour miniseries out of Frankenstein. The planned length was to get the most from the material. All that sounds good, but by October 2008, SlashFilm reported on an article from ComingSoon, where in del Toro’s words, he was taking the story in a new direction: "I'm not doing Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. I'm doing an adventure story that involves the creature. I cannot say much, but it's not the central creation story, I'm not worried about that. The fact is I've been dreaming of doing a Frankenstein movie since I was a child. The one thing I can promise is, compared to Kenneth Branagh, I will not appear shirtless in the movie!” Neither of those plans went anywhere, leading to an update from Collider in July 2010.
While discussing projects at Comic-Con, del Toro got to talking about — you guessed it — and in doing so, he revealed how deeply Mary Shelley’s writing affected him. “My favorite novel in the world is Frankenstein," he stated. "I’m going to misquote it horribly, but the monster says, 'I have such love in me, more than you can imagine. But, if I cannot provoke it, I will provoke fear.' As a child that was disenfranchised from everything, and that was in a world that was the wrong size, run by the wrong people, the wrong morale and the wrong rules, I felt completely outside of that, and I wanted some measure of control, and the measure of control I found was through fear.”
Guillermo Del Toro reflected on what the horror genre can provide. “We are such skeptics that we find it difficult to believe in God and angels and a spiritual afterlife, but a moment of fear makes our spirit so vulnerable that it allows us to believe in something beyond that. It’s also a boundary, and there’s nothing that defines who you are more than boundaries, whether you cross them or not, in every aspect of your life, and horror is a really great boundary.” What is Frankenstein about at its core, but the severe breaking of the boundary of life and death. The interview then moved into the most fascinating news.
The director wanted to test out designs of the Creature from Bernie Wrightson, Swamp Thing co-creator and illustrator for the 1983 edition of Shelley’s novel. The plan was for del Toro to use his muse Doug Jones for what would be a very different take on the reanimated character, when compared to perhaps the most iconic design seen with Boris Karloff. “He (Wrightson) came and designed it, and we executed it. We have all the pieces. They have been painted. We’re doing a test on Doug Jones very, very soon. Doug is the monster. We’re going to apply it and film it. Bernie designed the creature and he will be the main conceptual designer of it.” For a few years, nothing more would be heard.
A New Frankenstein's Monster (Possibly) For The Dark Universe
In July 2014, Collider gave another update where del Toro explained what really might be stopping him from truly committing to making the project, if anything, it only showed how humble and excited he was for it. “I mean, look, I would love to do Frankenstein and Bride, or Frankenstein for sure, but it really, Frankenstein has been — I've been really, really, afraid," he explained. "Donna [Langley] has approached me a few times to start it now and I'm always like, you know, it's like the dream project so I'm a little, I'm a chicken shit, you know? When I do it, I need to do it. Like, if I do Frankenstein, I literally would stop everything, and I’m going to a sabbatical of three years, just to write that. It's not something that’s gonna just flow, like second nature. It's my favorite book in history.”
Put together with del Toro’s anxiety, his work schedule at the time wasn’t cooperative as he was finishing up Crimson Peak (2015) and starting up Pacific Rim 2 (2018). The interview touched on del Toro’s thoughts of the studio’s planned (and doomed) Dark Universe, a shared cinematic home for the Universal Classic Monsters. “I personally think that they should all be period movies,” he said. “I would love to see Creature from the Black Lagoon in Victorian England with the Victorian exploration, with a balloon and steam riverboats. I would love to see The Hunchback, Phantom, you know?” His desire to keep them as period movies never happened, the evidence found in the contemporary-set The Mummy (2017).
Several years after del Toro became an Oscar-winning director for The Shape of Water, July 2020 arrived with some developing news. MovieWeb learned from a Comic-Con@Home panel del Toro had thoughts to turn Frankenstein into a trilogy — if he had the budget. “I would do either At the Mountains of Madness or Frankenstein, which I've always envisioned as a two to three-part story,” he went on to say. “Because, in order to encompass the book, you have to change points of view. It's a complex exercise.” That would bring us closer to the present day when del Toro truly became Dr. Victor Frankenstein, slowly giving life to this dream project.
In October 2020, there wasn’t so much an update as there was a final say on the matter. Doug Jones revealed to Collider how he didn’t go through the makeup tests del Toro mentioned back in 2014, however, he did see a bust of the artwork and was enamored by it, describing how it, “was more emaciated, little skinnier, little more pathetic looking. And yet, had an unnatural physical prowess, an unnatural athleticness to him. He was sewn together with spare parts of a couple different bodies. Very bony face, long, stringy, drawn hair.” Jones guessed the failure to the Dark Universe stopped del Toro’s plans at the time. And it's unknown whether in the green-lit Frankenstein for Netflix what part Jones could play, as early talks on the cast haven't included him, but Oscar Isaac, Andrew Garfield, and Mia Goth.
Guillermo del Toro Loves the Monstrous & Misunderstood
In an IndieWire article on a museum exhibition of del Toro’s horror memorabilia, the director expresses a well-known passion for strange and otherworldly creatures. “Monsters are the patron saints of otherness,” Del Toro says. “When I was a child, I was raised Catholic. Somewhere I didn’t fit with the saints and holy men. I discovered the monsters — in Boris Karloff, I saw a beautiful innocent creature in a state of grace, sacrificed by sins he did not commit.” Frankenstein's Monster could not be in better hands, even in the recent Pinocchio, del Toro plays around with the idea that creating a wooden boy is similar to a mad scientist’s experiment on reanimation.
Gepetto (David Bradley), in a drunken stupor and frenzied grief, strikes down a tree to cut into ugly, imperfect pieces as a storm rages outside his cottage. From this, he brings to life something that shouldn’t be anything but inanimate. From Mary Shelley’s novel to James Whale’s classic, the themes of being an outsider and the tragic, gothic horror elements are right at home with the director, who will no doubt tune it into his own style. Frankenstein’s Monster has always had a place in del Toro’s heart and it’s time to see him flip the lever to give a jolt of life to his dream project.