Guillermo del Toro says we have a sugarcoated misunderstanding of the Romantic literary movement, which spawned the classic Mary Shelley novel that inspired his film Frankenstein.
Del Toro tried to invoke the reckless, sometimes destructive spirit of Shelley’s world into the first part of his Best Picture-nominated film, which ultimately becomes a story of forgiveness.
“I mean, people think about the Romantics, they think about Fabio carrying a woman,” the director told film journalist Elvis Mitchell in a Sundance Film Festival Q&A Monday. “They were really almost punk.”
“They were also obsessive,” Mitchell added. “They were all obsessed with the idea that none of them would live past the age of 30, so they’re flinging themselves into every word they wrote, every dream —”
“Every experience,” del Toro interjected.
Then he ran through the tumultuous history of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who would go on to write Frankenstein and marry Shelley.
“May I remind everyone: Percy Shelley is married when he meets Mary Shelley, who is 16, and then he promptly falls madly in love with her, as does she. And when everything seems impossible to their romance, he climbs up the steps, breaks into her room with a bottle of laudanum, says, ‘You drink this and die,’ and he pulls out a gun, and says, ‘I’ll blow my brains right now.’ That’s the romantics.”
Eventually they ran off together instead. But their troubles were far from over.
“They have so much tragedy — three miscarriages in a row, the suicide of his wife,” del Toro continued.
Shelley wrote Frankenstein after the miscarriages, del Toro says, which may be a factor in the novel’s idea of producing life without a traditional birth.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was 22 when he and Mary began their relationship. He was, indeed, dead by 30. She lived to be 53.
Guillermo del Toro on Staying True to the Romantics With Frankenstein
While many past characterizations of Dr. Victor Frankenstein have portrayed him as soulless and morbid, Guillermo del Toro wanted him to be like a Byronic hero — a character of the kind written by the Romantic author Lord Byron, who is typically talented and driven, but also flawed, with little respect for tradition. Del Toro’s Dr. Frankenstein, played by Oscar Isaac, is alternately dashing and dastardly, moving fast and breaking bodies as he tries to assemble a new one.
The Romantics also influenced del Toro’s approach to The Creature played by Jacob Elordi in an Oscar-nominated performance.
Unless the bolt-necked Frankenstein of James Whale’s 1930s films, played by Boris Karloff, Elordi’s Creature is simultaneously grotesque and beautiful.
As del Toro has noted before, including in MovieMaker‘s cover story on him and Frankenstein, his Frankenstein is ultimately a story of forgiveness, inspired by the life of Christ. He recalls that as a young child, he came to connect religion and cinema, and beauty and pain.
“I was seven years old when I saw the original James Whale film on a Sunday after church,” he told Mitchell. “I was raised very, very, very brutally Catholic. And when I said brutally, I mean it like I was raised like my grandmother was the equivalent of Carrie’s mom. She would put bottle caps upside-down in my shoes for me to bleed for Jesus.
“I was a spokesperson for the Virgin Mary. I was an altar boy. And one fine day, a Sunday, I came home from church, and on Sundays, they showed monster movies on TV all day. And I saw this amazing film where I finally found Jesus: When Boris Karloff crosses the threshold, that was my Messiah.”
Main image: Elvis Mitchell, left, and Guillermo del Toro at The Elvis Mitchell Suite at Sundance 2026, by Moviemaker. You can read more of our Sundance 2026 coverage here,