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Latino Horror Is Rising with Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein
The arrival of the new Frankenstein adaptation, directed by Guillermo del Toro and starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, promises to redefine the monster’s myth with a more humane, intimate, and deeply personal perspective. The film, which has already been released in select theaters and on Netflix on November 7, not only breathes life into Mary Shelley’s novel but also reveals the emotional and creative background of those who brought it to the screen.
A long-awaited dream
Del Toro, an Oscar winner for The Shape of Water, considers this adaptation to be his most personal project. In an interview with The Independent during the London Film Festival, the filmmaker confessed, “a large part of the movie is autobiographical for me.” For him, Shelley’s novel is his “Bible,” and the monster his “Messiah.” The story of the creator and his creature becomes a mirror of del Toro himself, exploring wounds of fatherhood, rejection, and the need for love.
The Mexican director, born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, is the son of actress Guadalupe Gomez and Federico del Toro Torres, a used car dealer. Since childhood, he has been fascinated by monsters and the supernatural. Watching the 1931 Frankenstein for the first time, del Toro felt a reflection: “That’s me. That’s how I feel. That’s why I don’t fit in.” Decades later, he transforms that feeling into art.
Monsters, outcasts, and beauty in the darkness
Guillermo del Toro has built an unmistakable filmography, in which fantasy, horror, and science fiction intertwine with emotion and poetry. In works like Pan’s Labyrinth, Crimson Peak, or The Shape of Water, the monsters are not villains but mirrors of the human soul. His visual style blends the grotesque with the beautiful, and his gaze is always focused on the outcasts, those living between worlds.
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In Frankenstein, that sensibility goes to the next level. The father figure, present in both Shelley’s life and del Toro’s, becomes the narrative axis of a story that reinterprets the boundaries of creation and redemption.
A cast to bring the myth to life
The film’s cast is led by Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant and egocentric scientist playing God, and Jacob Elordi as The Creature, the being that defies the logic and soul of its creator. “You need Oscar’s eyes to understand he’s tortured, and Jacob’s to see the innocence,” explains del Toro.
Mia Goth, one of the contemporary muses of horror cinema, plays a dual role: Elizabeth Lavenza, the fiancée of Victor’s younger brother, and Claire Frankenstein, the protagonist’s mother. The cast is rounded out by Christoph Waltz as Harlander, the benefactor funding Victor’s experiments; Felix Kammerer as William Frankenstein; Charles Dance as the tyrannical patriarch; and David Bradley as the Blind Man, a key figure in the monster’s transformation.
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The story unfolds across the cold landscapes of the Crimean War and the Arctic, where the creature and its creator recount their versions of events to a captain (Lars Mikkelsen). Visually, del Toro combines period realism with his signature gothic and magical touch, creating a universe as dazzling as it is unsettling.
This version of Frankenstein strays from classic horror to delve into more emotional territory. It’s not about scares, but empathy. Del Toro explores the fragility of his characters, their contradictions and wounds, restoring the myth’s original essence: that of a being who just wants to be loved.
“This isn’t a horror film, though it is violent,” del Toro explains. “It’s a story about rejection and redemption, about how sometimes the real monster is not the one made of scars, but the one who causes them.”
With this reinterpretation, Guillermo del Toro not only pays homage to Mary Shelley, but also reaffirms his place as one of the great storytellers in contemporary Latin American cinema. His Frankenstein is unafraid to show the seams, both literal and emotional, of humanity. And in that act, he reminds us that we all, in some way, carry a bit of monster within.
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