Guillermo del Toro's ‘Frankenstein’ and his lifelong obsession with monsters and human imperfection

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In Guillermo del Toro’s new film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, when Dr Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) demonstrates his method for re-animating dead tissue, the assembled noblemen are outraged. “Ungodly", “an abomination", “a crime against God".

A bloody torso strapped to a pair of batteries, twitching and sparking like Luigi Galvani’s electrified frog-legs—a monstrous vision. But as is often the case with del Toro’s films, far bigger monstrosities lie within man’s wicked heart. Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), an arms dealer, promises to supply Frankenstein with body parts harvested from corpses during the ongoing Crimean War, which has proven to be quite profitable for Harlander.

The irony is clear—the science of cheating death, sponsored by the military-industrial complex. As Harlander puts it, “The tide of war shall deliver its bounty to our shore." This sequence underlines two recurring themes in del Toro’s filmography. One is authoritarian or war-mongering empires as villains, like the Francisco Franco regime in Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and The Devil’s Backbone (2001), or a Nazi-Soviet alliance in Hellboy (2004).

The second throughline is del Toro’s lifelong obsession with monsters. All his films involve demons, ghosts, fairies and other assorted supernatural creatures, either representing the excesses of empire but just as often, standing in opposition to its conservative values. Not only do these “monsters" help shape the director’s distinct aesthetic (he’s a master of both practical and computer-generated imagery), they are often far more humanised than del Toro’s human villains.