Netflix Frankenstein First Look Photo Fulfills a 50-Year Dream for Guillermo del Toro

On the one hand, it’s a simple enough image: Oscar Isaac, veteran stage and film actor, stands before an audience of physicians and academics. We can tell from the style of dress and unkempt hair that Isaac’s Dr. Frankenstein lives in the 19th century (so a bit unlike his literary counterpart). But there’s also a look of mania in his eyes; a face of obsession. It’s fitting for a new screen version of literature’s first mad scientist, and yet it is perhaps more befitting Guillermo del Toro, a celebrated director and dreamer who’s been trying to bring his Frankenstein to the screen for more than half a century.

“Over the decades, the character has fused with my soul in a way that it has become autobiography,” del Toro said in a video message shared with the press alongside the above image. “It doesn’t get more personal than this.”

Indeed, the story has been one del Toro first fell in love with on the page and screen as a child. The Mexican auteur’s affinity for the story spans countless iterations, including most famously the ones starring Boris Karloff and directed by James Whale. However, the literary version of the character dreamed up by teenage Mary Shelley in the summer of 1816 is the one del Toro first expressed public interest in adapting as far back as 2007. Back then he mused about directing Frank Darabont’s 1990s screenplay which hewed delicately close to Shelley’s novel (before it was heavily reworked into a 1994 film by writer-director Kenneth Branagh). At the time, del Toro complimented Darabont for capturing the “Miltonian tragedy” of the text.

The following year, del Toro began officially developing the project at Universal Pictures where it apparently morphed into more of an “adventure story that involves the creature.” However, that version was ultimately shelved, reportedly in part to make way for Universal’s attempt to build the so-called Dark Universe.

Ultimately, the past 18 years have been filled with starts and stops, and daydreams on the part of del Toro who as time has gone on has revealed an interest in not just adapting Shelley’s literary Frankenstein, but to also make the material its own.

Which brings us back to the fact that the Netflix release seems visibly set in the 19th instead of 18th century, as well as the fact that we know the film includes at least one character who only appears in Whale’s 1935 Universal Pictures film, The Bride of Frankenstein, with Christoph Waltz stepping into the role of Dr. Pretorious, a character originated by Ernest Thesiger.

This seems part and parcel with del Toro’s musings from 2008 about how he would like to combine “elements of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein without making it just a classical myth of the monster.”

If we had to guess, it is probably intentional that we are now seeing Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein before we glimpse Jacob Elordi as the Monster of the story. For those who have never read Shelley, it is true that the Byronic side of the character (or “Miltonian tragedy” as del Toro deems it) has never been adapted into cinema, although John Logan and Rory Kinnear got pretty close in the underrated Penny Dreadful.

We suspect getting an actor handsome enough to play young Elvis Presley and Heathcliff to be the Monster portends realizing an epic dream that has haunted del Toro for nearly all his life. This image, as well as confirmation that the movie will arrive on Netflix in November of this year, brings us a little closer to fulfilling it.

Del Toro’s Frankenstein will also star Mia Goth, Ralph Ineson, Charles Dance, Burn Gorman, and David Bradley.

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