Guillermo del Toro’s new Frankenstein trailer doesn’t just tease a story — it immerses us in a haunting visual world. Every frame is carefully designed to echo the past while carving out something new. Horror has always thrived on imagery, and this trailer pulls directly from decades of visual traditions: German Expressionism, Gothic romance, Universal horror, and even modern psychological thrillers.
Let’s take a closer look at how each design choice connects to a different chapter in horror’s visual history.
🧛 Gothic Grandeur (From Public Domain to the Big Screen)
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One of the most striking elements of the trailer is its Gothic visual style: towering castles, candlelit chambers, storm-lashed graveyards. These are not just stylistic flourishes — they come straight from the DNA of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which has long been in the public domain.
Because the novel is free for anyone to adapt, filmmakers across generations have reimagined its Gothic mood in their own way. Universal’s Frankenstein (1931) turned Shelley’s bleak landscapes into towering laboratory sets. Hammer Horror’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) infused it with lurid color and melodrama. And now, del Toro blends both approaches — a return to Gothic atmosphere, but with his own emphasis on tragic beauty.
The beauty of public domain works is that they never belong to just one era. The Gothic visual language Shelley created over 200 years ago continues to inspire new visions, each unique but tied to the same haunting foundation.
🌀 Expressionist Shadows (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari → Frankenstein)
The distorted lighting and looming shadows in the trailer immediately recall German Expressionism, where filmmakers like Robert Wiene (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920) used harsh contrasts to reflect inner madness. In the trailer, Victor’s laboratory and the Creature’s looming silhouette lean into this tradition — reminding us that horror often takes place as much in the mind as on the screen.
⚡ Science & the Monstrous Body (Frankenstein 1931 → The Shape of Water → Now)
The trailer shows fleeting glimpses of Victor’s experiments: sparks of electricity, steel instruments, the unnatural act of creation. These visuals nod directly to James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), where the image of Karloff’s stitched-together body became iconic. Del Toro updates this with his signature “monstrous beauty” — the Creature is terrifying yet strangely human, closer in spirit to The Shape of Water’s amphibian man than to the lumbering monsters of the past.
🎭 Masked Faces & Hidden Selves (The Phantom of the Opera → Modern Horror)
A recurring visual in the trailer is concealment: faces in shadow, characters half-hidden by candlelight, the Creature’s stitched features only partially revealed. This directly recalls The Phantom of the Opera (1925), where Lon Chaney’s masked visage embodied both terror and tragedy. Del Toro uses similar imagery to blur the line between monster and man, creator and creation.
🩸 Modern Parallels (Shutter Island → Frankenstein 2025)
Finally, the trailer’s psychological unease — dreamlike dissolves, unreliable points of view — echoes films like Shutter Island (2010). Just like early Expressionist horror, these visuals suggest that perception itself is unstable. The Creature’s search for identity and vengeance becomes not just physical, but psychological.
✨ Why These Themes Matter
What makes del Toro’s Frankenstein trailer so powerful is how it threads horror’s visual history together: Expressionist shadows, Gothic grandeur, the science-gone-wrong of 1930s horror, the tragedy of masked monsters, and the disorientation of modern thrillers. And thanks to the public domain, these Gothic roots remain alive — giving each new filmmaker the freedom to reimagine Shelley’s vision for their own age.
Horror, after all, has always been about more than just scares. It’s about images that stay with us long after the lights go up. And judging by this trailer, del Toro’s Frankenstein is about to give us plenty of new nightmares to add to that history.
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