In the annals of cinema history, there have been many movies inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's 1818 Gothic masterwork Frankenstein. To name
In the annals of cinema history, there have been many movies inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s 1818 Gothic masterwork Frankenstein. To name but a few, James Whale did it in 1931, and repeated the trick with The Bride Of Frankenstein in 1935; Mel Brooks turned the Promethean tale into the stuff of farcical gold with Young Frankenstein; and Robert De Niro channelled his inner creature to memorable effect in Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, heading to Netflix this November after a hard-fought 17 year journey to the screen, could well top them all — at least if the newly released trailer for the Mexican fabulist’s latest movie is anything to go by. Check out Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth, and Jacob Elordi getting their Gothic horror on in the teaser below;
From the Arctic Circle to the contraption strewn laboratory of Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein, burning effigies to lightning strikes, a veil draped Mia Goth to a hood-covered, Jacob Elordi shaped Creature laying waste to a baying mob, this looks like del Toro working at the peak of his powers. It’s dripping in decadent Gothic production design, full of epic vistas and grand sets, and — at the heart of it all — it’s abundantly clear that we’re in for a deeply faithful retelling of Shelley’s story of a man with an idea, “inevitable” and “unavoidable”, that consumed him heart and soul, and his reckoning with his own creation; a story of a troubled father forced to face his abandoned, outcast son. Given the thematic preoccupations of del Toro’s last movie, Pinocchio, it isn’t exactly tough to see how this pairing of source and filmmaker makes for a perfect pairing.
With an all-star cast boasting the likes of Felix Kammerer, Charles Dance, Christoph Waltz, and Galactus himself, Ralph Ineson, and del Toro having gone the long way round to make this passion project come alive (ALIVE!!!), we’re quietly confident that The Notorious GdT will have a Victor on his hands in more ways than one when Frankenstein hits Netflix this November.
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