Netflix has released the full official trailer for director Guillermo del Toro's hotly anticipated new film Frankenstein, starring Oscar Isaac as the brilliant but tragically flawed mad scientist, Victor Frankenstein.
Del Toro has been telling interviewers for years about his enduring love for Mary Shelley's novel and his long-standing desire to direct a film that would capture the novel's sense of grand Miltonian tragedy. He loved the original script for Kenneth Branagh's 1994 adaptation, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but the final film, alas, deviated sharply from that script and was just not that good. After several false starts, del Toro finally signed on to film his vision for Netflix in 2023. He called this film “the culmination of a journey that has occupied most of my life,” at the Netflix Tudum event earlier this year, adding, “Monsters have become my personal belief system. There are strands of Frankenstein through my films.”
"It was a religion for me," del Toro said during a press conference at the film's world premiere in Venice last month. "Since I was a kid—I was raised very Catholic—I never quite understood the saints. And then when I saw Boris Karloff on the screen, I understood what a saint or a messiah looked like. So I've been following the creature since I was a kid, and I always waited for the movie to be done in the right conditions, both creatively in terms of achieving the scope that it needed for me to make it different, to make it at a scale that you could reconstruct the whole world."