'This is autobiographical'

As Guillermo del Toro's version of 'Frankenstein' arrives on Netflix, he and the film's stars Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi speak to Clarisse Loughrey about its long gestation

- Clarisse Loughrey

Crack open Guillermo del Toro’s ribs, peer in the cavity inside, and there - where a beating and bloody heart should be - you'll find a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s the ur-text for so much of modern horror, yet when the filmmaker behind Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water describes the novel as “his Bible” and Boris Karloff’s film monster as his “Messiah”, it feels insufficient to say that he’s been merely inspired.

No, Del Toro is too ethereal for that - better to say he lives in communion with the young woman who began to write so feverishly one stormy Genevan night in 1816. He is our Father of Monsters, after all, and they all bear her Creature's scars: maligned, abandoned, and feared as they are. It's been his career's ambition to make Frankenstein, and after nearly two decades' worth of false starts and broken promises, it's finally come to fruition with a Netflix budget's worth of scale.

It's a beauty to behold, with that rich, Gothic lacquer that's come to characterise his work. Yet even if this is one of the most faithful adaptations ever made, it's the deviations from the text that hold the film's real power a sense that Del Toro's Frankenstein is his story as much as it is Shelley's. Its ache feels especially intimate.

“There are large portions of the movie that are autobiographical for me,” he tells me, sitting surrounded by candles and blood-red flowers the day after the film's UK premiere at the London Film Festival. “I do that because [Shelley] basically wrote an autobiography of her soul.”

“I know Mary Shelley through Guillermo, so I care for her through him,” says Jacob Elordi, who plays his Creature (Oscar Isaac stars as his creator, Victor Frankenstein). “For me, it’s Guillermo as an influence and how she has influenced him, the way he sees the world and his suffering and his pain. Because I see the Creature as an extension of that, you know?”