Don’t be shocked that Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein isn’t horror

Guillermo del Toro recently spoke at the Cannes Film Festival, sharing some details about his upcoming film Frankenstein, set to release on Netflix later this year. As reported by Variety, he said he’s been asked whether his movie will have “really scary scenes.” That prompted the Academy Award-winning director to ponder how people would receive the movie made: “For the first time, I considered that. It’s an emotional story for me. It’s as personal as anything. I’m asking a question about being a father, being a son… I’m not doing a horror movie — ever. I’m not trying to do that.”

While it can be confusing to hear a man with story and producer credits on a film literally called Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (adapted from the excellent book of the same name) say he’s “not trying to do” horror, that mindset aligns with most of his career.

Del Toro’s early movies, like Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone, can certainly be classified as horror. While his later films feature frightening elements, though, they break away from conventional horror and lean more into gothic fantasies and dark fairy tales. I was as scared as anyone by the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth, perhaps his most famous film, but that doesn’t make it a horror movie. It’s more of a fantasy and a parable, examining the realities of war through the eyes and imaginative reinterpretations of a young girl.

Though Crimson Peak tells a ghost story, it features romance at its core. And The Shape of Water continues a focus on romance, as well as telling a story centered around embracing the Other. With an ending that sees protagonist Elisa (Sally Hawkins) becoming a mythical creature herself, it’s more of a fairy tale than a horror film.

Emphasizing with the ostracized is at the core of plenty of del Toro’s work, whether its Elisa and The Amphibian Man’s fairy-tale-esque love story or Hellboy’s pursuit of normalcy in del Toro’s adaptation of Mike Mignola’s comics. “The first time I thought I was going to avenge the creature was when Marilyn Monroe is coming out [of 1954’s The Creature from the Black Lagoon] in The Seven Year Itch with Tom Ewell, and she says the creature just needed somebody to like him,” del Toro said at Cannes. “I fell in love with Marilyn, and I fell in love with the creature in that scene at a very early age. And I thought, you know, all we have is people that look at people the wrong way. That’s what we have in this world.”

Don’t expect Frankenstein to be any different. “[F]or me, it’s an incredibly emotional movie,” del Toro said. With its focus on the parental relationship between Victor Frankenstein and his creation, Frankenstein sounds similar to del Toro’s last film, the stop-motion Pinocchio. “[Geppetto] has asked, almost like in a horror tale: ‘I want my child back.’ And the child comes back in a way that he doesn’t recognize,” del Toro told Polygon about Pinocchio in 2022. It marked his return to animation after a pooping burglar destroyed his first attempt at the medium. Now that’s what I’d consider a horror story.