Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is now playing in theaters for a limited rum ahead of its Netflix premiere on November 7, and a first look at Jacob Elordi's transformation into the story's tragic deuteragonist has been unveiled.
We have seen a few obscured glimpses of The Creature in the various trailers, TV spots and behind-the-scenes looks released online over the past few weeks, but this portrait fully unveils his character design.
As you can see, this take on Frankenstein's Monster is a lot less, well, monstrous than most other incarnations, and looks a lot closer to Mary Shelley's description than the flat-headed, neck-bolted Boris Karloff version that has become synonymous with the character.
"What we were trying to do was almost put the inside of a human body up on the outside for all to see. That’s why the veins are shown as clear as they are,” prosthetics artist Mike Hill explains to Variety. “You see the patterns where Victor’s taken this apart and put it back on and decided that’s wrong. So he’s making a man for the first time, so he’s not getting entirely correct on the first go. There are a few patchworks, a few mistakes, and this is what this body’s showing. We created this body.
"So you can literally see him bolting the leg together and extending this man to make him taller than an average human,” Hill continues. “What we decided is, if you were going to create a man, you wouldn’t go and get 10 bodies and someone together, what’s the point? You’d get the very best body you can get. And then say, ‘Okay, his hand is damaged in the war, so we have to replace the hand, his foot’s damaged. We have to replace it.”
Check out the image below, along with portraits of the movie's other main characters.
Frankenstein centers on a brilliant but egotistical scientist (Oscar Isaac) who brings a creature (Elordi) to life in an experiment that ultimately leads to the undoing of both the creator and his tragic creation.
“This film concludes a quest that started at age 7, when I saw James Whale’s Frankenstein films for the first time. I felt the jolt of recognition in that seminal moment: Gothic horror became my church, and Boris Karloff my Messiah,” del Toro said in a statement when the project was first announced.