Crack open Guillermo del Toro’s ribs, peer in the cavity inside, and there – where a beating and bloody heart should be – you’ll find a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s the ur-text for so much of modern horror, yet when the filmmaker behind Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water describes the novel as “his Bible” and Boris Karloff’s film monster as his “Messiah”, it feels insufficient to say that he’s been merely inspired.
No, Del Toro is too ethereal for that – better to say he lives in communion with the young woman who began to write so feverishly one stormy Genevan night in 1816. He is our Father of Monsters, after all, and they all bear her Creature’s scars: maligned, abandoned, and feared as they are. It’s been his career’s ambition to make Frankenstein, and after nearly two decades’ worth of false starts and broken promises, it’s finally come to fruition with a Netflix budget’s worth of scale.
