In ‘Frankenstein,’ Guillermo del Toro confronts the monster in the mirror

TORONTO – Guillermo del Toro first met “Frankenstein” at the age of seven, and in the Creature’s tortured gaze, he saw himself.

A local television channel in Guadalajara, Mexico ran horror films on Sundays from morning to night, and when he stumbled across the 1931 monster movie, Boris Karloff’s performance struck him deeply.

“I identified with him completely,” del Toro recalls.

“I said, ‘That’s how it feels to be me on the inside — that creature that is out of place, nobody is completely happy with him.'”

He laughs softly, remembering the moment his lifelong obsession began.

“Then at 11, I read the book, and I thought, ‘What is this? The book is completely different from the movie.’ And I said, ‘I can do that movie!’ Youthful exuberance, you know? And then it just took about 40 years to do.”

Del Toro’s “Frankenstein” is a $120-million, Toronto-shot epic decades in gestation — one the 61-year-old filmmaker says he’s glad he didn’t sire sooner.

“If I’d made it when I was younger, it would have just been the gripes of a son toward a father,” he says of his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Gothic classic, which hits theatres Friday before streaming on Netflix on Nov. 7.

It wasn’t until he became a parent himself — raising two daughters, now adults — that he gained the perspective to approach it fully.

“Now it’s about the desire for forgiveness of a father who was originally a son, and who realizes life has thrown him into a role he’s not fulfilling,” he says during a virtual interview.

Oscar Isaac stars as Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the anguished scientist obsessed with creating life, while Jacob Elordi plays the Creature he brings into existence.

Del Toro, who’s made a career of empathizing with monsters — from 2006’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” to his Oscar-winning 2017 fantasy “The Shape of Water” — says his “Frankenstein” is the story of a “chain of pain” fathers hand down to sons, and what it takes to break it.

“That’s very biographical,” he admits. “That’s not in the book. That’s not Mary Shelley. That’s me.”

Born in Mexico to an actress mother and an automotive entrepreneur father, del Toro says he vowed early on to forge his own path.

“You say, ‘I’m going to be different than my father’ when you’re young. And then at 40, your father is in the mirror. All of a sudden, ‘You go, ‘Oh my God, I’m my old man,’” he laughs.

“And now, after 50, I am turning into my mother. One day I’ll be just me.”

Becoming a father, del Toro says, has given him the chance to break generational patterns.

“To listen — that’s the big change,” he says of what parenting has taught him.

“Friends tell me their kids are going through a difficult age, and I go, ‘No, they’re telling you the truth. You just don’t want to hear it.’ But when you wonder, ‘What if they’re right? What if I was absent? What if I was selfish?’ Then you snap out of it and you go, ‘Oh my God, they’re absolutely right.’”

When we first meet Dr. Frankenstein, he’s gripped by fear as the Creature hunts him down, determined to confront the man who both created and abandoned him.

Del Toro hints at a similar reckoning — when his own daughters became teenagers, they held him accountable too, forcing him to face the parts of himself he’d rather ignore.

“All that rage teenagers feel is actually an act of love. They want you to not be that person, for your own good. And when it’s successful, it’s very moving. In my case, it took time, but it was successful.”

At the film’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere last month, del Toro quipped during a Q&A that he’s in his “regret decade,” drawing audience laughter.

But he says he meant it sincerely.

“When you’re young, you have a mission. Later, you have remission,” he says. “You go, ‘I wish I had been more wise. Or the opposite — I wish I had been wilder.’ The balance in life is between love and fear and you can have regrets about both. You may have loved too much or feared too much.”

He chuckles when asked which side he leans toward.

“I’ll figure it out when I’m 70 — and then I’ll die,” he grins. “At 60, you start doing the final accounting: ‘I owe this much money, I have this much money.’ It’s the same with emotions or spiritual stuff.”

That sense of reflection carries into his upcoming projects. He’s working on an animated adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel “The Buried Giant,” which he calls “90 per cent about regret and 10 per cent about memory.”

Remorse also shows up in “Fury,” a thriller del Toro is writing that will reunite him with Isaac.

“It’s about two men that regret very different pasts, and they basically travel together in a journey while killing people, and they talk. It’s my ‘Dinner with Andre’ with a bunch of murder.”

While it may seem unlikely that a director of his stature would dwell on past mistakes, del Toro insists success doesn’t spare anyone.

“I have known many of the great artists of our times, and they’re also human. The fact that you’re good at one thing means that you must be really bad at a dozen others,” he says.

“I have never met a perfect person, fortunately.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct.15, 2025.