While Frankenstein’s Monster is often considered one of the most iconic horror movie creatures of all time, it seems that director Guillermo del Toro doesn’t think of him that way — at least, not in his version of the story.
Per Variety, the director said he wasn’t trying to make a horror film when adapting the seminal novel, originally written in 1818 on a dare between friends at their Geneva lakehouse. The film, which stars Oscar Isaac as Dr. Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as his creation, hits Netflix this November, but del Toro insists that, despite creating iconic monsters of his own, he’s never thought about his films as horror movies while making them.
“It’s an emotional story for me,” he said at Cannes Film Festival over the weekend. “It’s as personal as anything. I’m asking a question about being a father, being a son. I’m not doing a horror movie — ever. I’m not trying to do that. What I can say is, for me, it’s an incredibly emotional movie.”
Bloody Disgusting also notes that the Shape of Water director made similar comments in 2015 about Crimson Peak, his Gothic romance starring Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain. “I think if you go in [to it] expecting non-stop scares or for it to function as a horror movie,” he said, “you will not engage the movie into what it’s trying to be, which is a square out, lavish, gothic romance.”
It’s not exactly as simple as being one thing or another — Gothic stories do still fall under the umbrella of horror, however tangentially — but it speaks to author Mary Shelley’s original themes that the Oscar winner is considering Frankenstein as a story of creation and family rather than an out-and-out scary movie. While, sure, James Whale created one of the most iconic movie monsters of all time when he brought The Creature to life via Boris Karloff, there’s a lot he missed out on too; hopefully we’ll see some of those more intimate sequences from the book make their way into del Toro’s film.
Netflix’s Frankenstein also stars Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, Ralph Ineson, and Felix Kammerer. The Pan’s Labyrinth director helms the film from a script he wrote based on Shelley's novel, with producers Gary Ungar, Scott Stuber, and J. Miles Dale.
Frankenstein hits Netflix in November.
