Like a raving alchemist who one day wakes at the frigid ends of the Earth, Guillermo del Toro has pursued the ghost of Frankenstein all his life.

The chase to tackle the material is a public affair for the Mexican filmmaker and artist, beginning when he first mused about making a faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s story in 2007. But the obsession long predates that. Del Toro was seven when he first watched James Whale’s classic Frankenstein picture from 1931, the one starring Boris Karloff as a mute, deformed innocent who simply wants to pick flowers with a child… yet winds up killing the flowers and child both. The future storyteller was then 11 when he cracked open Shelley’s 1818 novel, subtitled The Modern Prometheus . And at once, he felt his mind broadened and haunted

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