The Saint, the Rock Star, and the Mirror: That's Frankenstein for Netflix
Guillermo del Toro
A seven-year-old boy in Guadalajara watches Boris Karloff rise from a slab and sees Jesus Christ.
That's not hyperbole. That's Guillermo del Toro describing the moment that redirected his entire life. Raised strictly Catholic, he'd never connected with the saints in church — they were distant, painted, dead. But Karloff's Creature, lurching into the light with those sunken eyes and stitched forehead? "I saw the resurrection of the flesh, the immaculate conception, ecstasy, stigmata." He'd found his religion. Everything that followed — thirty years of monsters, labyrinths, and love stories disguised as horror films — was an attempt to build a cathedral worthy of that first vision.
Frankenstein is that cathedral. Del Toro spent three decades circling this material, and the film carries the DNA of everything he watched, read, and lived along the way. Here's the map.
The Creature He Worshipped
James Whale's Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein
Del Toro didn't just admire Whale's films — he organized his creative life around them. He saw them before he could read the novel, and the experience was so total that he describes Karloff in the language of conversion: "I understood what a saint or a messiah looked like."
What he took is both visible and structural. The creation sequence in del Toro's film — an operatic cascade of lightning, steam, and moonlight — is a direct expansion of Whale's iconic laboratory scene, scaled up with the resources Whale never had. Creature designer Mike Hill planted a quiet tribute: a single blue-gray patch on Jacob Elordi's forehead, echoing the blue Max Factor makeup Karloff wore in 1931. And costume designer Kate Hawley built Mia Goth's white wedding dress as an explicit homage to Elsa Lanchester's bandaged Bride — the ribbon bodice connecting Elizabeth to the Creature through shared wrapping.
But here's where del Toro breaks from Whale: Karloff's Creature was a childlike innocent. Del Toro and Elordi chart a full developmental arc — from something animalistic and feral to an articulate philosopher. The sound team plotted this evolution scene by scene, gradually stripping away layered animal effects to let Elordi's real voice emerge. It's a performance that starts where Christopher Lee's empty, "obscenely alive" Hammer creatures left off, then builds toward something neither Karloff nor Lee attempted.
Watch Whale's original Frankenstein and you'll see a film that's smaller and stranger than memory suggests — intimate where you expect spectacle, tender where you expect terror. Del Toro saw that tenderness at seven and never forgot it.
The Illustrations on the Shrine Wall
Bernie Wrightson's Frankenstein (1983)
Elordi turned his apartment into a shrine during filming. Wrightson prints on every wall. Oscar Isaac did the same. Both actors were following del Toro's lead — the director owns nine of Wrightson's original pen-and-ink illustrations and considers the artist part of a holy trinity alongside Karloff and Mary Shelley.
Wrightson spent seven years — unpaid — creating 45 illustrations for a deluxe edition of Shelley's novel. He deliberately ignored every existing screen version, working directly from the text to produce a creature that was gaunt, pale, wide-eyed, and dressed in scavenged military clothing. More human than monster. More designed than damaged.
That distinction is everything in del Toro's film. Elordi's Creature looks sculpted — delineated muscle groups inspired by anatomical diagrams and Marco d'Agrate's marble sculpture of Saint Bartholomew flayed alive. As creature designer Mike Hill put it, "I needed him to look like it came out of an 18th century textbook. It was all done by a man's hand and not some kind of accident." Wrightson's intricate crosshatching — those deep blacks against luminous highlights — also found its cinematic equivalent in Dan Laustsen's single-source lighting and the film's palette of amber and steel blue.
Track down the illustrated edition. The level of obsessive devotion Wrightson poured into those pages mirrors exactly what del Toro poured into this film.
Not Horror — Romance
Rebecca, Wuthering Heights, and the 1940s Gothic Tradition
Del Toro cited Hitchcock's Rebecca, William Wyler's Wuthering Heights, Dragonwyck, and Uncle Silas as direct inspirations — and naming them tells you everything about what kind of film he thought he was making. These aren't horror movies. They're stories of women trapped in grand houses with dangerous men, shot in sumptuous black-and-white with expressionistic lighting and brooding atmosphere.
Del Toro used this lineage to reposition Frankenstein entirely. Elizabeth, as played by Mia Goth, isn't a damsel — she's a Gothic heroine, "out of place in the world," who connects with the Creature through shared alienation. The Frankenstein estate sequences owe more to Dragonwyck's architecture of secrets than to any monster movie. And the film's emotional center — a doomed love between two people who shouldn't exist — is pure Gothic romance, closer to Heathcliff and Catherine than to any mad scientist narrative.
If you've only seen Rebecca through the Hitchcock lens of suspense, revisit it for the atmosphere. That's the register del Toro was tuning to.
The Rock Star in the Operating Theater: Mick Jagger, Prince, and Victor's Rebel Energy
This one surfaced almost exclusively in Spanish-language press, which is exactly the kind of detail The Frame of Reference exists for.
Oscar Isaac revealed that del Toro wanted Victor to radiate "rock star energy, almost punk." Together, they studied the stage presence of Mick Jagger and Prince — the swagger, the danger, the sense of someone who knows they're the most electric person in the room. Costume designer Kate Hawley translated this into flared trousers, heeled boots, and dramatic coats drawn from 1960s London fashion. As del Toro put it, "Víctor es como una estrella de rock en la comunidad médica, pero rebelde."
The metaphor goes deeper than wardrobe. The film frames Victor's creation of the Creature the way a music biography frames a legendary concert — the transcendent artistic peak that the creator can never surpass, and that slowly destroys him in its aftermath. Isaac delivers a performance calibrated to this frequency: he fills del Toro's vast, cathedral-like sets the way a frontman fills an arena.
Thirty Years of Rehearsal
Del Toro's Own Filmography
"If my dream was to put a man on the moon, which is this movie, Crimson Peak is the Apollo 11." Del Toro is explicit: every film he ever made was preparation.
The connections are specific. Crimson Peak was his Gothic vocabulary test — lavish period design, operatic emotional register, and the line that unlocks Frankenstein: "Love makes monsters of us all." The Shape of Water was a dry run for the central love story; del Toro originally pitched Universal a version of Creature from the Black Lagoon where the creature and the girl fall in love — and when that didn't happen, he made it anyway as The Shape of Water. Pinocchio rehearsed the father-son creation myth with a puppet maker instead of a scientist.
Even the visual motifs carry forward. The circle — del Toro's signature shape, recurring across Crimson Peak, Shape of Water, and Nightmare Alley — appears throughout Frankenstein in the ship's portholes and Victor's lab. Del Toro noted that "the circle is broken when the Creature takes control of the ship — that's finally the liberation in the film."
Start with Crimson Peak. It's the closest relative in del Toro's family tree — the film where he first built the Gothic house he'd spend a decade trying to burn down.
The Mirror at Forty: Fatherhood and Generational Trauma
In Spanish-language coverage from Venice — never picked up by the English press — del Toro said something devastating: "When I was young I told myself: I'm going to be a very different man from my father. And at forty-something I looked in the mirror and… there was my father."
This is the film's deepest current. Victor's father, Baron Leopold (Charles Dance), expresses affection through a gesture that's "just a bit too harsh" — a hearty clap on the shoulder. Victor mirrors it toward the Creature. The cycle of inherited damage, passed down through bodies that don't know they're carrying it. Del Toro calls it "a tool to talk about how we pass on pain blindly — and how you can stop passing it."
Oscar Isaac found the same thread. "We come from Latin families where the shadow of the Father looms very large." Their early creative conversations happened entirely in Spanish — a language Isaac associated exclusively with his late mother. As he explained, del Toro "returned him to that language that forces you to go to the core of things, without detours." The film's emotional architecture was built in a language most of its audience will never hear.
Color as Scripture
Hitchcock and Fellini's Philosophy of Light
Del Toro invoked two filmmakers not for visual references but for a principle: "Hitchcock said, 'when colour came to me, I applied it judiciously.' Fellini said basically the same: 'I'm going to use colour as expressively as I can.'"
Every color in Frankenstein means something. Red belongs exclusively to Victor and Elizabeth — blood, passion, the defiance of death. White marks death and purity: the ship's interior, Elizabeth's wedding dress, the Creature himself. Steel blue is the Creature's world of isolation and cold. Cinematographer Dan Laustsen tested Barry Lyndon's candlelight aesthetic during prep and deliberately rejected it — Kubrick's even, naturalistic glow was wrong for the emotional turbulence del Toro wanted. The final palette — amber warmth curdling into cold blue as relationships deteriorate — owes more to Fellini's operatic instincts than to Kubrick's measured classicism.
Rewatch anything by Fellini in color — Juliet of the Spirits, Amarcord — and you'll recognize the principle: light and color as emotional states, not documentation.
A Masterpiece About a Masterpiece
Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein
In a detail buried in Mexican newspaper Milenio, del Toro called Brooks's comedy "a masterpiece" — and then offered a piece of trivia that reveals his encyclopedic obsession: Young Frankenstein is primarily based on Son of Frankenstein, not the more famous first two Whale films. Most people don't know that. Del Toro does, because he tracks the Frankenstein lineage the way a musicologist tracks samples.
It's a small moment in the research, but it crystallizes something essential about del Toro's relationship to the material. He doesn't just love Frankenstein — he knows its entire family tree, including the parodies, and he understands that even comedy can illuminate the source.
The Pattern
Map del Toro's influences for Frankenstein and a single word keeps surfacing: devotion. Devotion to Karloff's face at age seven. Devotion to Wrightson's pen strokes across seven unpaid years. Devotion to Shelley's 1818 text — specifically the messy first edition, not the polished revision. Devotion to the father he couldn't stop becoming.
This isn't a filmmaker assembling references. It's a filmmaker completing a pilgrimage. Every film in his career was a station of the cross, and Frankenstein is the altar he was walking toward all along.
If you watch one film before seeing del Toro's Frankenstein, make it Crimson Peak. Not because it's his best — but because it's where you can feel him reaching for something he hadn't yet earned. The Gothic mansion, the doomed love, the monster made by grief. Two years later, he'd make The Shape of Water and get closer. A decade after Crimson Peak, he'd finally arrive.
