Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein Plays It Too Safe

It’s fun to wonder whether Bush—or any of the other moralists determined to “eliminate all actual repulsive situations” from Shelley’s tale—were among the punters lining up 20 years later for James Whale’s sublime Universal Studios version of Frankenstein—a movie that not only pleased the general public but fixed the image of poor, flat-topped Boris Karloff, shuffling stoically through the Bavarian Alps (actually Malibou Lake, California), in the pop-cultural subconscious for all time. The Creature—billed as “?” in the opening credits—changed the world; he was tender and terrifying, not a predatory aristocrat like Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula but a lumpenproletarian golem, the people’s champ. All the poor brute ever wanted was a friend. So what if a little girl accidentally got drowned in the process?

“I’d like to salute the monster, who really is the best friend I ever had,” said Karloff in 1965. When breaking down the dozens of screen adaptations of Frankenstein made in the decades since—sequels and spin-offs, gross-outs and kiddie flicks, satire and soft-core porn, Doctors Fronkenshteeen and Frank N. Further—the prevailing common denominator between them is a sense of respect for Whale’s eerie, surpassingly humane take. The most lyrical homage came via Spanish director Victor Erice’s 1973 masterpiece The Spirit of the Beehive, in which a mobile cinema brings Whale’s Frankenstein to a hamlet on the Castilian plateau under the control of Francoist forces. The film’s protagonist is a young girl who conflates the wounded Republican soldier hiding in a local barn with her memories of Karloff; she resolves to protect him from the authorities. The child’s-eye perspective of Erice’s masterpiece confers grace on the Monster while reconfiguring him, however abstractly, as a symbol of political resistance.

The Spirit of the Beehive is a favorite film of Guillermo del Toro, who drew directly on its setting and subtext for his widely acclaimed 1940s period piece Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). Del Toro is what you might call a blank-check director these days, having parlayed the success of Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water into a series of dream projects, including a (lovely) stop-motion version of Pinocchio and a deluxe, Netflix-subsidized version of Frankenstein. “They’re kind of the same myth,” del Toro told a recent interviewer; “I’ve always said, ‘I’m going to shoot Pinocchio like Frankenstein and Frankenstein like Pinocchio.’” It’s a good quote, and it accounts for the casting in the latter of Jacob Elordi as the Creature. Whatever else one can say about the slender, airbrushed Australian, he is a Real (It) Boy, and probably a limit case for taking a character defined by insecurity over his appearance and turning him into a sex symbol.