Del Toro: At home with monsters

From his earliest films to 'Frankenstein', Guillermo del Toro's work has featured memorable screen monsters

- Aditya Mani Jha

In Guillermo del Toro's new film adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, when Dr Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) demonstrates his method for reanimating 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 warmongering 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.