With Frankenstein, Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro (Pinocchio) adapts Mary Shelley's classic tale of Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant but egotistical scientist who brings a creature to life in a monstrous experiment that ultimately leads to the undoing of both the creator and his tragic creation.
A new trailer for the movie will be released tomorrow, and a poster has just been released that offers our best look yet at the titular movie monster.
Frankenstein's monster is still comprised of several dead bodies in this movie; however, with Jacob Elordi playing him, it likely won't surprise you to see that he looks a little more measured and less hideous than many previous interpretations.
We saw one of those last week, courtesy of actor Christian Bale, when the first trailer for filmmaker Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! was released. There's a good reason why Frankenstein's monster looks the way he does, though.
"Ever since I started drawing the creature in the late '70s and early '80s, I knew I didn’t want symmetric scars and I didn’t want sutures or clamps," del Toro said earlier this month. "What I thought was very interesting was to make him like a jigsaw puzzle. I wanted him to look beautiful, like a newborn thing, because a lot of times, Frankenstein steps into the frame and he looks like an accident victim."
"But Victor is as much an artist as he is a surgeon, so the cuts had to make aesthetic sense. I always thought about him as made of alabaster. I never understood something about the other versions: why does Victor use so many pieces from so many bodies? Why doesn’t he just resurrect a guy who had a heart attack?"
"And the answer for me was, what if the bodies come from a battlefield?" the filmmaker added. "Then he needs to find a way to bring the corpses together in a harmonious way."
At the center of Frankenstein are Oscar Isaac (Ex Machina, Inside Llewyn Davis), Jacob Elordi (Saltburn, Priscilla), and Mia Goth (X, Emma).
Joining that main trio are Felix Kammerer (All Quiet on the Western Front), Lars Mikkelsen (The Witcher, Ahsoka), David Bradley (Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, the Harry Potter films), Christian Convery (Sweet Tooth), with Charles Dance (Game of Thrones, Mank) and Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained).
Frankenstein lurches onto Netflix on November 7, but arrives in select theaters on October 17. You can check out this new poster in the Instagram post below.