Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, known as one of Mexico’s “Three Amigos” alongside directors Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro Iñárritu, spent his summer in Scotland filming his long-awaited “Frankenstein” adaptation. Although del Toro has “no direct blood ties” to the country, he used social media platform X to express his feelings of “deep connection” to the gloomy valleys and gothic nature of Scotland.
Posting selfies in cemeteries and second-hand bookstores in “Embra” — as he nicknamed Edinburgh, the country’s capital — what most captured my imagination was del Toro’s series of posts about haunted hotel rooms in my birthplace of Aberdeenshire.
Guillermo takes Scotland
Del Toro, who admits to “always being in the most haunted room,” revealed that despite having “high hopes,” he has never encountered anything supernatural. But this time, the 19th-century castle where he lives – already abandoned by one of the producers because of its “oppressive atmosphere” – looks promising.
While del Toro promises monster-loving audiences to find “something’” hiding in the room, locals focus on getting a glimpse of “Frankenstein’s” star-studded cast, including Jacob Elordi, Oscar Isaac and names to match. Mia Gothic. Trish, the local Post Office manager, becomes a minor social media sensation after demanding to meet sultry actor Charles Dancesaid: “I have asked him to be sent here immediately!”
In a hypothetical Venn diagram comparing Mexico and Scotland, it seems right that a healthy share of crossover should be reserved for Netflix’s adaptation of Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein.” Although Mary Shelley’s iconic novel is largely set in Switzerland, the themes of resurrection and hubris feel especially fitting in Scotland, where science and the macabre have long gone hand in hand.
Ancestral vocations may also have played a role in this merging of influences: del Toro hinted that his sudden interest in Gaelic life could have stemmed from his Irish lineage on his mother’s side, and between two cultures sharing an important festival ‘threshold’ — the Día de los Muertos in Mexico and Samhain, the Celtic precursor to Halloween — there’s fertile ground for tales of creatures pacing the liminal space between this life and the next.
Del Toro, who describes himself as a “death group” and spent more than a decade trying to make this project, called “Frankenstein” a reality. a film he would “kill to make. The high priest of the outcast, his supernatural rejects of society often remain as human as their ‘real’ counterparts.
In “Pan’s Labyrinth,” eleven-year-old Ofelia escapes the brutal reality of 1930s Francoist Spain through the vast kingdom beneath her home. In “The Shape of Water,” mute janitor Elisa Esposito begins a romance with an amphibious creature imprisoned by the U.S. government in a Cold War-era Baltimore laboratory.
Set in Mussolini’s interwar Italy, our revered idols are scaled down in “Pinocchio.” when del Toro emphasized that we must be ourselves in order to be recognized for who we really are. At one point, the excommunicated doll, gazing at a statue of Christ in a church, asks, “He’s made of wood too. Why do they like him and not me?”.
In del Toro’s extraordinary modern world, overshadowed by authoritarian rule, the Other leaks and overwhelms rational thinking and long-held institutional beliefs. The villains are often those who worship at the altar of man-made power structures, like Strickland in “The Shape of Water,” a Cadillac-driving everyman, or the Franco loyalists in “The Devil’s Backbone,” who are more concerned with finding a stash of gold hidden in the parlor’s yard their upbringing rather than the ghost of the boy who haunts the place.
Victor Frankenstein, a scientist blinded by ego, constructs a creature that, like many of del Toro’s antiheroes, is beyond society’s understanding of what a real human being should be. Del Toro views imperfection as “one of the most beautiful things”, and was said by his friend Alfonso Cuaron to bring his beloved characters closer to the afterlife as a way of “bringing them peace”.
For a filmmaker who grew up under the hot sun Guadalajaradel Toro has a cool Celtic sensibility that, in “Frankenstein,” perhaps fuses Mexico and Scotland’s twin ties to the afterlife. Like Victor Frankenstein, the director is a master at absorbing ideas from the undergrowth and breathing new life into them, resurrecting and reconstructing outsiders into distorted yet realistic reflections of ourselves.
Bettine is originally from the Scottish Highlands and currently lives in Mexico City, working in film development at The Lift, Mexico’s leading independent audiovisual production company.
