Klaus wrote:
I'm more interested in his version of Frankenstein that he wants to make so badly. He's the only filmmaker I've seen who correctly identified it as the quintessential teenage angst novel. There have been so many versions in other media throughout the years and not a single one has ever been particularly close to Shelley's vision.
I think he'd struggle badly with it.
Obviously, Del Toro being Del Toro, the Monster would be far more beautiful and humanised than his clichéd horror tradition. But Frankenstein is a high concept philosophical novel: the point is that the Monster is simultaneously a man, he is a transcendent object that doesn't easily reduce to a fixed visualisation.
I reckon Del Toro, who starts making his ideas visually concrete very early in the creative process, perhaps due to his background in makeup and effects, would produce a beautiful but leaden action figure and a film that missed the underlying philosophical menace of "the Modern Prometheus" …
