“All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things!”
Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is now playing in theaters for a limited rum ahead of its Netflix premiere on November 7, and following a series of character portraits featuring our first full look at Jacob Elordi's transformation into the story's tragic deuteragonist, a new social media spot has been released which includes several new shots of The Monster.
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 teaser gives us our best look yet at the character design.
As you can see, this take on Frankenstein's Monster is a lot less, well, monstrous than most other incarnations, and looks quite a bit closer to Mary Shelley's description than the flat-headed, neck-bolted Boris Karloff version that has become synonymous with the character.
“There’s so many different layers to the costume,” Elordi said of playing the classic literary Monster during a recent interview with Variety. “When he’s born, he’s wearing nearly nothing. His chest is open and his head is high. Then, as he starts to experience pain, as we do as a teenager, he starts to hunch his shoulders. And as an adult, he closes off.”
“You throw time away when you make a film like this,” Elordi adds. “I stopped having a clock, and I would just wait till the SUV arrived. That meant it was time to go. I didn’t do breakfast, lunch or dinner, or think in terms of morning, afternoon, night. It was just one time.”
Check out the new teaser below, along with the recent character banners.
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.