The monster is alive – yet again – in the teaser trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which is to say that he’s twitching and kicking and still securely in vitro. His arrival is heralded with great pomp and ceremony – with title cards and a growling voiceover and a veritable baby shower of moody, rain-lashed exoticism – but the creature himself, played by Saltburn’s Jacob Elordi, is shrewdly kept under wraps. He’s a half-built shape on a cross in the lab. He’s that tall, hooded figure on the ice by the boat. We’ll know him when we see him, when the film comes out this autumn, because he’s part of a family, the latest in a long line of dead ringers. He’ll probably look much the same as all his ancestors did.
Lazarus may have first dibs on the regeneration game, but Frankenstein’s monster leads the field in repeat performances and curtain calls. The first Frankenstein movie was a 1910 silent short, and since then, we’ve had nearly 200 others, each charting their own course through an evergreen tale of renegade science, reanimated body parts and a hubristic experiment that takes on a hideous life of its own. The creature has been played by everyone from Boris Karloff to Robert De Niro to Joe Dallesandro. It has been restitched and renamed as Blackenstein, Frankenhooker and Frankenweenie. It provided the touchstone for Victor Erice’s Spanish Civil War classic The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and the wet clay for Emma Stone’s Oscar-winning performance in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023). The evidence of the box office suggests that Frankenstein is a perennial and that it connects with all eras. But it speaks to some more than others – and possibly ours more than most.
