Emotive reason Jacob Elordi was cast as Frankenstein’s Monster revealed by Guillermo del Toro as director also shares his family trauma

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

A director who has given us some of the most indelible monsters in screen history, Guillermo del Toro has had a fascination with the macabre from an early age. Very early. He was no more than two when he saw an episode of TV series The Outer Limits. “I got scared so bad that I started dreaming of monsters in a lucid way,” he recalls. “I would wake up in my room and there would be creatures that were not real… I offered to become their friend if they let me climb out of the crib to go to the bathroom.”

Across his childhood in Mexico and a three-decade career in Hollywood, Del Toro has made peace with those monsters. Think of the Pale Man, the humanoid with eyeballs in his palms, in 2006 fascism allegory Pan’s Labyrinth. Or the amphibious captive in 2017’s The Shape of Water, the film that won Del Toro two of his three Oscars (the third was for his beautifully animated Pinocchio in 2022). Now the director is taking on the greatest monster of them all: the Creature at the heart of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, in a mesmerising adaptation starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi.

Del Toro was 11 when he first read the gothic classic, a Spanish-language copy he picked up in a supermarket that he still has to this day. But his obsession was fired four years earlier, when he saw Boris Karloff’s unsettling monster in James Whale’s seminal 1931 Frankenstein. He calls it his St Paul on the road to Damascus moment. “I went into some sort of seizure of joy,” he says, when we meet at the Venice Film Festival, where his impeccably crafted Frankenstein received its world premiere.

Now 61, he’s dreamed of making this film his entire career – longer, even. “I wanted to make this movie before I had a camera, before I knew what a camera was,” he explains. “There are a few seminal figures in my childhood that loom large. Creature from the Black Lagoon, Phantom of the Opera, Dr Frankenstein, the Hunchback, Pinocchio. And those are sort of my holy touchstones. Because I identify. I identify with the Hunchback. I identify with the Phantom. I identify with the Creature of Frankenstein. You take pieces of self from the world and create a composite.”

All his life, he’s collected Frankenstein memorabilia – including a life-size sculpture of Karloff by Mike Hill, the creature designer who worked on Frankenstein. Del Toro, who has been married to American critic and screenwriter Kim Morgan since 2021, has them all on display at home. “I call that area the living room,” he chuckles. “When you go to a Catholic home, you see Virgin Marys. You see crucifixions on the walls. They’re the same in my house, but for monsters.” A reaction to his strict Catholic upbringing, perhaps.

Raised in Guadalajara, he had a privileged childhood – not least because his father Federico won the lottery when Del Toro was small. A car dealer, Del Toro Senior had always been strict with money. But after the windfall, two things made an incredible impact on his son. “Firstly, we could go to Disneyland every year. Which was very formative for me. The second thing is that somebody told him, ‘Now that you are rich, you should have a library.’ And my dad bought a bunch of books that he never, ever read. But I did. That changed my life.”

Del Toro devoured encyclopaedias of art and anatomy, which became his roadmap for Frankenstein, the timeless story of a scientist who recklessly plays creator, bringing life to a cadaver, stitched together from body parts. With Oscar Isaac cast as egomaniac Dr Victor Frankenstein, the 6ft 5in Jacob Elordi, star of Saltburn and The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is the perfect Creature – physically imposing, yet struck by the wonder of the world as he experiences it afresh. For Del Toro, it was all in Elordi’s eyes. “When I saw them, I said, ‘This is the Creature. No doubt about it.’”

One of the most faithful adaptations of Shelley’s book, the film is a sure-fire front-runner in this year’s Oscar race. But for Del Toro, it’s bigger than that. It’s about evolution. Once upon a time, his movies were “close to fairy tales or fables where the monster was good and the humans were bad”. Then came 2021 period noir Nightmare Alley, with Bradley Cooper. “That was the first time that I really thought, ‘Well, can the protagonist be the antagonist?’ And Frankenstein is that, too. Can the protagonist be the antagonist? Can the monster also kill people instead of being just a victim?”

Although Del Toro prefers the word “creature” to “monster”, which has a more human connotation. “Monsters in real life have expensive suits and wear smiles on TV. That’s the real monstrosity,” he says. “When you say, ‘Country, motherland, patriotism’, these are things that sound very good, but the way they are enacted is monstrous. Or when people are selling the marvels of AI, and at the same time they’re saying, ‘Look, knowledge is not important. You have an app. Ask it.’ At the purely biological point of view, your synapse is not going to fire. How is that good for you?”

Politicians and tech moguls aside – the obvious villains of our time – Del Toro has experienced real monsters. In 1998, his father was kidnapped, with a $1 million ransom demanded. Del Toro was broke; he’d sunk all his money on 1997’s Mimic, and had also made a loss of $250,000 on his 1992 debut film, Cronos. Fortunately, his friend – Titanic director James Cameron – gave him the money to hire a hostage negotiator, who saw to it that Federico was freed after 72 days.

Even now, Del Toro gets the shakes thinking about it. “Since my father was kidnapped I simply have an amount of PTSD that I cannot really handle, because it’s on a visceral level.” Returning to Mexico [he has homes in Toronto and Los Angeles] still gives him the fear. “I go back, I go back, and I love going back, but very soon I feel shortness of breath, or I feel agitation, and then I leave.” The abduction was “second in my catalogue of pain”, he says, now almost in a foetal position. “I think Mimic was worse.” The sci-fi/horror brought fierce clashes with now-jailed producer Harvey Weinstein.

Since Mimic, Del Toro craftily built up his Hollywood stock, switching between big-budget studio pictures such as Blade II (2002) and Pacific Rim (2013) and more personal films such as The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Crimson Peak, his 2015 gothic drama that, in many ways, was an aesthetic dress rehearsal for Frankenstein. While there have been high-profile disappointments – notably, pulling out of The Hobbit in 2010 – he’s one of those rare directors who is able to paint his visions on a grand scale.

But it has been far from easy. When it comes to being a director, “You have to be a mixture of a poet and a boxer and a pusher,” he says. “What I hate is when people say ‘visionary’. It’s like you’re on ayahuasca on a chaise longue! You’re not. You’re crossing the jungle with a machete.” Del Toro may joke that he’s been “cursed” with his bulky physique, but there is something of the adventurer or athlete about him. “It’s a contact sport, making movies. It’s not a delicate, languishing, dictation of poetry.”

Since 2022, he’s worked with Netflix – Pinocchio, anthology series Cabinet of Curiosities (both 2022) and now Frankenstein. It will be shown in a few cinemas, but Del Toro is unconcerned that most people will watch Frankenstein at home, on a small screen. “I saw 90 per cent of my Universal monster movies as a kid on TV,” he shrugs. He also understands how the business works these days. “First of all, you make it for whoever pays for it.” Never mind the size of the screen, he adds: “What you don’t sacrifice is the size of the ideas.”

Fortunately for Del Toro, horror is a box office evergreen. “I think that we need horror to understand the world, because beauty can be pretty oppressive,” he reasons. “Horror is very liberating.” It’s also the perfect genre to smuggle across different ideas, “from the flights of philosophy of David Cronenberg; the social horror of Jordan Peele; or straight-down scare-horror, beautifully executed, like [Zach Cregger’s 2025 film] Weapons, which I adored.”

Now, with Frankenstein finally on our screens, Del Toro is in mourning. “There’s a bereavement and an achievement at the same time,” he says. So what next? He recalls A History of Violence director Cronenberg, “a friend for almost 30 years”, once telling him: “The only way to stay alive as a director is to try something that is different and that scares you into being someone else.” To that end, he’s planning a violent thriller, Fury, with Oscar Isaac in the lead. Maybe this time he’ll find the monster within.

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