How Guillermo del Toro conjured a ‘Frankenstein’ monster unlike any before

Director Guillermo del Toro and Oscar Isaac, who plays the titular Dr. Victor Frankenstein, at work on the set of “Frankenstein.” Del Toro’s “Frankenstein” reinterprets both the myth and the monster, which unlike many before it, feels newly born rather than repaired. (Ken Woroner/Netflix)

By MAYA SALAM

Guillermo del Toro has been shaping his vision for Victor Frankenstein’s monster since he was 11 years old, when Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 Gothic novel became his Bible, as he put it in a conversation in August.

“Why is it made of many parts?” he recalled wondering as a boy. “I started thinking about the logic of that.”

Now, the filmmaker, with three Oscars to his name, has finally manifested his dream. His “Frankenstein” (out Oct. 17 in theaters and Nov. 7 on Netflix), reinterprets both the myth and the monster, which unlike many before it, feels newly born rather than repaired. Yes, that means no stitches.

“We didn’t want it to feel like an accident victim,” he said, referring to his collaboration with Mike Hill, also a “Frankenstein” acolyte and the film’s creature designer. “We wanted it to have the purity or translucency of almost like a newborn soul,” del Toro said, “to follow it from being a newborn soul into being — an ‘I think therefore I am’ sort of a human.

Not to say that previous interpretations, what del Toro called “North Stars in our lifetime,” didn’t figure into the vision. There’s the silhouette of the military wardrobe that Bernie Wrightson used to illustrate the monster for Mary Shelley’s book in a famous edition printed in the 1980s; the dead stare of Christopher Lee in “The Curse of Frankenstein” from 1957; some of the religious aura surrounding Boris Karloff’s monster from the 1930s, perhaps the image — a lumbering monster with scars and neck bolts — that surfaces in most minds.

Still, del Toro’s creature is promised to be a first in the “Frankenstein” canon. Here’s an early peek at how it came together.

This Victor Frankenstein (played by Oscar Isaac) is not just an anatomist and a scientist, but also an artist. And from the beginning, he is seen working with anatomical waxes, a material with inherent patterns that has been used for centuries to sculpt models of human or animal bodies, organs and muscles.

In Shelley’s novel, Victor says that he has discovered a secret that allows him to build the monster through his own technique. But del Toro noted that Shelley had deftly bypassed exactly how the creature comes to life.

“That may sound like a cheat,” del Toro said, but it was an opportunity for imagination.

Previous movies and onscreen interpretations, he pointed out, often just show Victor robbing graves to acquire body parts, then suddenly the creature is complete.

“I wanted to detail every anatomical step I could in how he put the creature together,” del Toro said. “There is a personality to the way he put together this creature.”

It’s a sequence that veers from the expected visuals of thunderstorms, diagonal shadows and silhouettes. Instead, this Victor is akin to a performer and his monster’s construction is shot as a concert might be. “It’s like you’re watching Leonard Bernstein conduct an orchestra,” del Toro said. “This is not the most horrifying moment in the movie, it’s the most joyous.”

In Milan’s Duomo is Marco d’Agrate’s unsettling 16th-century marble statue of St. Bartholomew, one of Jesus’ 12 apostles who is said to have been flayed alive and then beheaded.

This work was a major influence for del Toro, who recalled Shelley describing the veins, tendons and muscles as visible under the creature’s stretched skin. Sending Mike Hill photos of alabaster statues became part of their process and also helped guide what would become the monster’s ethereal color palette: ivories, very pale blues and violets with some nicotine colors.

Above all, he said, he wanted “to make it feel like a handcrafted beautiful work of art.”

Del Toro and Hill also looked at medical documentation and tools, both historical and current, including a dental phantom, a mannequin of the human head and jaw used by dental students and professionals to practice procedures. It comes into play during a scene in Shelley’s novel that is rarely portrayed onscreen: The moment when Victor wakes up believing that the creature has died and that the experiment has failed, only to see it alive and watching him from the foot of his bed.

“It’s very shocking and beautiful. And I said OK, how do we see the creature without seeing the creature?” del Toro said. So he pictured a metal mask on top of the monster’s bandages as well as a metal rib cage on top of its chest as part of the devices used for the resurrection.

The placement of the bandages were of particular interest to del Toro, who said that they needed to have rhythm without symmetry as well as theatricality and a flourish.

The special effects team created a clay miniature of the monster’s body and head, on which they were able to play with potential lines. They considered where scars would make sense and how joints might be extracted.

Even a huge curveball just nine weeks before production started didn’t faze del Toro. Jacob Elordi stepped into the role of the monster when Andrew Garfield, who is many inches shorter, dropped out because of scheduling conflicts.

“Mike said, ‘We have nine weeks,’ and I said, ‘Wrong. We’ve had all our life.’ I said, ‘We’ve been preparing for this movie for all our life.’”

He reminded Hill that Jack Pierce, the artist who created the Karloff makeup, would build that look from scratch every day without molds. “I said, ‘It ain’t gonna be harder than that. So we are prepared.’”

The film’s plot includes a photographic record of how the creature is put together, a record that’s kept on glass plates.