Guillermo del Toro Reveals His Early Horror Movie on HBO Max Has the ‘DNA’ of Frankenstein
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is easily one of the most anticipated films of the year. But for Del Toro, it’s also the culmination of decades of dreaming. The Oscar-winning genre auteur has waited years to make his dream project, and now it’s finally coming this fall.
Del Toro’s waited so long to make Frankenstein, in fact, that he says you can see the echoes of it in all of his early films. In a new interview, he noted that you can go all the way back to his very first feature and see the story’s “DNA.”
“It’s a movie I wanted to make before I even had a camera,” Del Toro told Variety. “There’s the DNA of Frankenstein on Cronos, on Blade II, on Hellboy. And we were developing it at Universal before they passed. I pitched it everywhere. It’s been my Mount Everest to climb.”
Released in 1992, Cronos marked Del Toro’s feature directorial debut, and many of his favorite themes were already there. The story of an antique dealer (Federico Luppi) who discovers a mysterious device that grants him eternal life, it’s the filmmaker’s first vampire story. The device, you see, also brings with it a thirst for human blood, and eventually turns the antique dealer into a monster.
But as with all of Del Toro’s horror films, the monster is met with tremendous sympathy. In telling the story of an alchemical device that people covet and pursue, Del Toro examined Frankenstein‘s themes of human scientific hubris. And in treating his protagonist, Jesus Gris, as a sympathetic figure who becomes an outsider, he cemented himself as a filmmaker who loves his monsters.
From Hellboy to The Shape of Water, Del Toro has built a reputation for not just reveling in, but adoring monstrous characters. The Shape of Water is quite literally The Creature from the Black Lagoon as a love story, but it’s far from the only example. He’s a filmmaker and storyteller who wants to probe every vulnerable space each monster has with tremendous empathy. That love and empathy for monsters, according to Del Toro, goes right back to the first time he saw Frankenstein.
“Even at that early age, I felt, ‘my God, this is so soothing for me to see the creature and his innocence,'” he said. “He was an outsider. He didn’t fit into world. He was out of place in the same way that I felt as a kid.”
Cronos is streaming on HBO Max as part of the app’s Criterion Collection offerings. Frankenstein arrives in theaters October 17.
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