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October 2024
Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, celebrated as one of Mexico’s so-called "Three Amigos" alongside directors Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro Iñárritu, spent his summer in Scotland filming his long-awaited adaptation of Frankenstein. Although del Toro has “no direct blood ties” to the country, he took to X/Twitter to express feeling a “deep connection” to its gloomy glens and gothic nature. Posting selfies in graveyards and second-hand bookshops in ‘Embra’ – as he nicknamed Edinburgh, the country’s capital – what most captured the imagination was a stream of posts about a haunted hotel room in my birthplace of Aberdeenshire.
Del Toro, who claims he “always stays in the most haunted room,” revealed that despite “high hopes”, he has never yet encountered anything supernatural. This time, however, the 19th-century castle where he was staying—already abandoned by one producer for its “oppressive vibe”—seemed promising. Whilst del Toro fed his monster loving audience with promises of discovering the ‘something’ lurking in the room, locals focused on catching a glimpse of Frankenstein’s star-studded cast, including Jacob Elordi, Oscar Isaac and the appropriately named Mia Goth. Trish, the manager of the local Post Office, became a minor X/Twitter sensation in her own right after demanding to see the sultry actor Charles Dance, saying: “I’ve asked for him to be sent here immediately!”. The country was rooting for Trish to get her wish, even if, like del Toro’s ghost, Dance ultimately got stage-fright and was a no-show.
In the hypothetical pie chart comparing crossovers between Mexico and Scotland, it seems right that a healthy slice should be reserved for Guillermo del Toro’s Netflix adaptation of Frankenstein. While Mary Shelley’s iconic novel is set largely in Switzerland, its themes of resurrection and hubris feel at home in Scotland, where science and the macabre have long gone hand-in-hand.
At the time Shelley wrote Frankenstein, Scotland was at the tail end of its Enlightenment period, with Edinburgh the beating, bloody backdrop for stories of intellectual fervour and gore, including that of Burke and Hare, infamous gravediggers who made a business selling corpses to anatomists. Shelley’s gothic tale similarly seems tailor made for a director whose career is defined by sympathetic monster-led stories that straddle science-fiction and folklore.
Ancestral callings may also be at play in this merging of influences: del Toro hinted that his sudden passion for Gaelic life could stem from Irish lineage on his mother’s side, and between two cultures that share important ‘threshold’ festivals – Mexico’s Día de los Muertos and Samhain, the Celtic precursor to Halloween – there’s fertile ground for the tale of a creature pacing the liminal space between this life and the next. Del Toro, who claims to be a ‘death groupie’ and spent over a decade trying to get this project off the ground, called Frankenstein a film he would “kill to make”. The high priest of the ostracised, his supernatural societal rejects often remain deeply, if not more, human than their ‘real’ counterparts. In Pan’s Labyrinth, eleven-year-old Ofélia escapes the brutal reality of 1930s Francoist Spain and the drab tragedy of her mother’s marriage through a sprawling kingdom under her house, where she is revealed to be its rightful heir by a faun. In The Shape of Water, mute janitor Elisa Esposito begins a romance with an amphibious creature imprisoned by the U.S. government in a Cold War-era Baltimore laboratory, with whom she communicates in sign language and feeds boiled eggs.
In del Toro’s uncanny modern-day worlds, overshadowerd by authoritarian rule, the Other leaks into and swamps long-held rationale and institutional beliefs. His villains are often those who worship at the altar of man-made power structures, such as The Shape of Water’s Strickland: a square-jawed everyman who drives a Cadillac and reads The Power of Positive Thinking, or the Franco loyalists in The Devil’s Backbone, who are more concerned with with finding a stash of gold hidden on the grounds of their orphanage rather than the ghost of a boy haunting the premises.
Victor Frankenstein, a scientist blinded by ego, constructs a creature who, like many of del Toro’s antiheroes, exists outside society’s understanding of what a real person should be. Del Toro views imperfection as “one of the most beautiful things,” and is said by his friend Alfonso Cuaron to bring his beloved characters close to the afterlife as a way of “bringing them peace”. The director has said the character he feels closest to is Pinocchio –protagonist of his most recent stop-motion adaptation. In del Toro’s version, which sticks closer to the book, rather than a dreamy ingenue the puppet is an anarchic troublemaker made of wood from a coffin.
Set against Mussolini’s interwar Italy, the idols we revere are brought down to scale in Pinocchio as del Toro pushes the point that it is not we who should mould ourselves to be what others expect or want, hoping to one day lead a ‘real life’, but be ourselves to the point where we are recognised as valid for who we are. At one point the ostracised puppet, looking up at an effigy of Christ hanging like a limp marionette in a church, asks “He’s made of wood too. Why do they like him and not me?”.
For a filmmaker brought up under the sweltering sun of Guadalajara, del Toro has a chilled Celtic sensibility that, in Frankenstein, might fuse Mexico and Scotland’s twinned links with the Afterlife. Like Victor Frankenstein, he is a master of soaking up ideas from the undergrowth and breathing new life into them, resurrecting and reconstructing the outsider to be a distorted but no less realistic reflection of ourselves.