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Frankenstein has been a long time coming for Guillermo del Toro.

The visionary filmmaker and lover of misunderstood monsters recently shared at the Lumière Film Festival that he was seven years old when he saw James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein on TV after a family trip to mass.

The impact was immediate.

“When I saw Boris Karloff, I understood religion in that moment,” he said. “I understood Jesus, ecstasy, the immaculate conception, stigmata, the resurrection... I understood that I had found my messiah. My grandmother had Jesus. I had Boris Karloff.”

The impact lasted and set him on a path to becoming the filmmaker he is today.

Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” is the story del Toro been telling his whole life, ever since his first film Cronos in 1992.

From the cure to an illness taking on a life of its own in Mimic (1997) to the prodigal father / imperfect child dynamic inherent to Hellboy (2004), the Gothic romance of Crimson Peak (2015) to the vilified monster seeking human connection in The Shape of Water (2017), and even the creator / creation core of Pinocchio, Shelley’s novel has always been an intricate part of del Toro’s art.

Now, the man who has been telling humanist monster stories and tales of outcasts for as long as he’s been making movies finally releases his passion project, something which can be conside