How do you adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein yet again and keep it fresh? Well, one way is to take a hot young handsome actor and turn him into the Creature... which is exactly what Guillermo del Toro has done with Jacob Elordi for his new Netflix film.
Due to be released in September, the film stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Mia Goth as Elizabeth Lavenza, and from what we can tell from the first images, it will be the kind of fantastical Gothic production which del Toro is known and loved for. The lush eccentricity of Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water seem to be very much to the forefront again.
Although it seems the body horror aspects of the tale are very much going to be at the forefront, with one behind-the-scenes image showing del Toro and Isaac chatting beside a grisly cadaver.
But as for the Creature, it appears that heartthrob actor Elordi - best known for Saltburn - will be following closely the route established by Robert De Niro’s Creature in Kenneth Branagh’s film, or that of Rory Kinnear in Penny Dreadful, in echoing closely the description of the being in Shelley’s novel:
‘His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.’
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That said, old horror fans will be pleased to know that the production wanted to bring a bit of Boris Karloff - who starred in James Whale’s 1931 classic and the sequels Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Son of Frankenstein (1939) - to Elordi’s Creature.
Elordi said he’d studied Boris Karloff’s performances: “I devoured all of his monsters. At first I thought, I’ll stay away from this. I want to do my own thing.’ And then I asked Guillermo, ‘Should I watch the other Frankensteins?’ And he goes, ‘What the fuck do you mean?’ I was like, ‘Well, I don’t want it to be influenced.’ He says, ‘My friend, it’s a movie, it can’t fucking hurt you.’ I went home, and I just binged them.
Something in his gaze, something in the way that he moves…. The biggest thing was just immersing myself in the world of these creatures.”
Makeup artist Mike Hill told Vanity Fair, “What attracted me to [Elordi] was his gangliness and his wrists. It was this looseness. Then he has these real somber moments where he watches you really deftly, and his eyelids are low, with the long lashes like Karloff. I was like, ‘I don’t know who else you could get with a physicality like this.’ His demeanor is innocent, but it’s encompassed in a six-foot-five frame. He could really do a lot of damage if this man really wanted to be a bad guy.”
Of course, whether to be a bad guy or not, is something the Creature has to wrestle with in the book, or rather, if you appear to be monstrous should you therefore become monstrous, or will society force you to be, regardless?
We can’t wait for this one.
