The first filmed version of Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) was the silent short Frankenstein (1910). Since then, more than four hundred versions of Shelley’s sutured-together golem have bestridden both the large and small screen. The most well known remains Universal Pictures’ Frankenstein (1931) and its sequel, Bride of Frankenstein (1935), pre-Code gothic horrors which implanted Boris Karloff’s pitiable Monster in the collective imagination forever after.

It comes as little surprise that Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro should now attempt his own reanimation of Shelley’s novel. Del Toro has long been fascinated by monsters, from the vampiric Jesús Gris in the Frankenstein-adjacent début Cronos (1993), to a humanoid amphibian in The Shape of Water (2017), and the sentient puppet of Pinocchio (2022). As well as evincing his interest in the loathed and spurned Other, del Toro’s fascination with god-like creators crafting living entities from inanimate matter is also, in its way, a reflection of the art of the director.