“My attraction to the Romantics is this existential sense of beauty in the horror,” del Toro notes, alluding specifically to the idea that during their courtship, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Percy Shelley traded poems, and perhaps other affections, in secluded graveyards. “I couldn’t think of a better term for what I like than graveyard poetry,” del Toro sighs.
A specific image derived from that type of poetry is also the one del Toro has been most eager to transfer to the screen: the sight of a creator awakened in the night by the “watery, speculative” eye of his creation at his bedside. It is a scene Mary first dreamed up on a stormy night in Switzerland, and it inspired the whole masterpiece that followed.
“When Victor wakes up in the bed, spent and exhausted after creation, and the Creature is looking at him from the foot of the bed, that’s stayed with me all during my life,” del Toro says. “I said, ‘Oh my God, I hope nobody does that scene, because it’s my favorite scene in the book.’ And fortunately for me, nobody did.”
When most audiences watch del Toro’s Frankenstein on Netflix next month, or manage to see it in theaters in the waning days of spooky season, they’ll witness that coveted moment. And yet, after all these years of planning and dreaming by del Toro, it will not be as how Shelley wrote it. In the book, the Creature is at this point monstrous; grotesque; an abomination that stands as evidence against its creator’s hubris. Yet in the film, Oscar Isaac’s Victor and the movie he leads admire Jacob Elordi’s ethereal, genuinely Miltonian New Man. It is a scene of awe and wonderment; a triumph for Victor Frankenstein and Guillermo del Toro both. They’ve made their dreams flesh, and like any true creator, they cast it in their own image.
“I think that when you talk about the word adaptation, you should think about a fish that needs to adapt to land; they are completely different mediums, and it has to grow lungs,” del Toro considers. “At the end of the day, I say adapting is like marrying a widow. You can pay respect to the late husband, but on Saturdays, you gotta get it on.”
This is the tale of how del Toro adapted, and got on to bringing his own modern Prometheus to life.
